Address to the Lowy Institute for International Policy
by António Guterres, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
“The changing face of global displacement: responses and responsibilities”
Sydney, 14 February 2012
(check against delivery)
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is a great pleasure and privilege for me to be with you today.
Less than two months ago, UNHCR concluded a year-long campaign to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 50th anniversary of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. Inevitably, these anniversaries have led us to reflect on the state of the 43.7 million people worldwide – about twice the population of Australia – who have been forcibly displaced from their homes by conflict and persecution. To meet their protection needs in the next decade will require a sound understanding of the changing dynamics of displacement, and the responses available to the international community.
UNHCR was created sixty-one years ago to lead and coordinate international action to protect refugees and resolve refugee problems worldwide. Today, only about one-third of our people of concern – 10.5 million – are refugees. More than twice as many others are displaced within their own countries by conflict and violence. Some 3.5 million persons under our mandate are stateless, although estimates go as high as 12 million stateless people world-wide.
But none of these figures, as daunting as they may be, can convey the full scale and complexity of forced displacement today. In an increasingly imbalanced world, violence and persecution are multiplying, as the large displacement crises of 2011 have shown in Côte d’Ivoire, North Africa and the Middle East, Somalia and Sudan. Nearly 800,000 people became refugees last year as a result of these events. While many Ivorian and Libyan refugees have since gone back, return remains a distant hope for those who were uprooted from their communities in Somalia and in the Blue Nile and South Kordofan states of Sudan. Nearly a quarter of Somalia’s population is now displaced, and more than five million people are affected by displacement in and around Sudan and South Sudan.
But as new crises multiply, old ones seem to never die. Conflicts are becoming more intractable, and sustainable political solutions are rare, leaving millions of refugees unable to return home to places like Afghanistan, Iraq or the eastern DRC. Durable solutions have become difficult to attain, and more than two-thirds of the refugees under UNHCR’s mandate now live in protracted situations of exile, having left their country of origin more than five years ago. Voluntary repatriation opportunities are scarce, with the number of annual returns in the last two years having dropped by 80% from the average of one million returnees per year over the past two decades. Similarly, the global total of available resettlement spaces – some 80,000 every year – covers only one in every ten refugees in need of this solution.
