2009 Worst Year Ever for Refugees | Human Rights

Refugees have a hard time making the evening news without the mesmerizing beauty of a Hollywood superstar like Angelina Jolie propelling the TV cameras toward them, but the latest stats should be enough to open some eyes on their own.

According to United Nations refugee chief Antonio Guterres, 2009 was the worst year on record for refugees. With an increase in conflicts around the globe, there were 15 million refugees last year. Add that figure to the 27 million people internally displaced within their own countries and you had a whopping 43 million people driven from their homes in one capacity or another in 2009.

Explaining this rise is complex and contested, but it is safe to say that a contributing factor is that conflicts are becoming more and more difficult to solve, making peace that much harder to achieve. In states like Afghanistan and Sudan, for example, refugees have little expectation of returning to their homes in the near future, given the seemingly never-ending state of warfare in which they find themselves. Palestinian refugees and their descendants, many of them claiming refugee status for decades, account for some five million of the total refugee population.

As the former prime minister of Portugal so aptly put it: "We are witnessing the creation of a number of quasi-permanent, global refugee populations."

While many refugees would be happy to permanently resettle in the countries to which they fled, there is often little government cooperation in helping them to resettle, or simply a lack of availability of services. Indeed, most displaced people are living in developing countries that are hardly able to provide for their own citizens, much less support the needs of the displaced.

For those refugees who seek asylum in the U.S., legal technicalities make it extremely difficult for asylum to be granted. This is true even in cases in which there are well-founded fears of persecution, such as a judge's determination of the clear probability that an asylum seeker will be tortured if returned to their home country.

The 43 million displaced people around the world need support and protection from the international community. But perhaps more important, they need not to be forgotten.

Readers in the U.S. can help by contacting your Senators and telling them to co-sponsor the Refugee Protection Act of 2010

Photo Credit: Albert Gonzalez Farran

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via humanrights.change.org