June 20, 2008	Friday	Jamadi-us-Sani 15, 1429

RAWALPINDI, June 19: As the World Refugee Day is being observed on Friday, Pakistan continues to be placed among the 10 major refugee-hosting countries with 2 million Afghan refugees.

Though the Afghan refugees can be found in 72 countries worldwide, 96 per cent of them are living in Pakistan and Iran.

Ahead of the refugee day, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has expressed concern over the growing number of refugees worldwide in a just-released survey that estimated 11.4 million refuges and 26 million other displaced internally by conflict or persecution at the end of 2007.

The “2007 Global Trends Report” says the number of refugees and internally displaced people (IDP) under the UNHCR’s care rose by 2.5 million last year, reaching an unprecedented 25.1 million by year end.

The new report notes that Afghan refugees comprise around 3 million living mainly in Pakistan and Iran, and the Iraqis are about 2 million mainly in Syria and Jordan and both account for nearly half of all refugees under UNHCR’s care worldwide in 2007, followed by Colombians (552,000) in a refugee-like situation, Sudanese (523,000) and Somalis (457,000).

It says much of the increase in refugees in 2007 was a result of the volatile situation in Iraq. The top refugee-hosting countries in 2007 included Pakistan, Syria, Iran, Germany and Jordan.

The report says the steady decline in refugee numbers witnessed since 2002 was reversed in 2006 when numbers started going up again. By the end of 2006, there were an estimated 9.9 million refugees.

One year later, the global figure of refugees stood at 11.4 million, including 1.7 million people considered by the UNHCR to be in a refugee-like situation.

The United Nations says conflict and poverty, the most common reasons because of which the people are compelled to leave their homes, are now amplified by the effects of climate change, scarcity of resources and food shortages — factors which may lead to greater insecurity in the future.

Compounding these challenges is the fact that the responsibility of providing asylum currently falls disproportionately on developing nations.

Contrary to public perceptions in many industrialised nations, developing countries actually bear the burden of hosting a larger number of refugees, despite their limited resources, the UN says.

The United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951 defined a refugee as a person who is outside his or her country of nationality or habitual residence and who has a well-founded fear of persecution because of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.

Since 1951, human displacement has become a far more complex issue. Distinguishing a refugee from a person driven across a border by sheer hunger is often very difficult. Population flows are now driven by interrelated factors and, as barriers to human mobility have fallen, protecting the displaced has become a greater challenge.

Some 647,200 individual applications for asylum or refugee status were submitted to governments and the UNHCR offices in 154 countries last year.

The report says the increase can primarily be attributed to the large number of Iraqis seeking asylum in Europe. The year also saw a decline of some 3 million people who had been considered stateless, primarily as a result of new legislation in Nepal providing citizenship to approximately 2.6 million people, as well as changes in Bangladesh. It is estimated that there are some 12 million stateless people worldwide.