The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) recently released a report titled “Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2020”, which sheds light on forced displacement around the world as result of oppression, war, violence or human rights violations. In figures, the report unveiled that yet again a record high of 82.4 million people were forcibly displaced in 2020, in comparison with 79.5 million a year before, and more than double the figure reported in 2010 (41.0 million). This figure represents an annual rise of around 2.9 million in the number of displaced people around the world. To put things into perspective, this number implies that 1 out of 95 people on earth is considered to be displaced compared to 1 out of 97 inhabitants a year earlier and 1 out of 159 people in the year 2010. The UNHCR has broken down the number of displaced individuals into three main categories namely, internally displaced persons (48.0 million; 61.15%), refugees (26.4 million; 33.63%) and asylum seekers (4.1 million; 5.22%).

The report commented that the majority of refugees around the world comes from Syria (6.7 million) followed by Venezuela (4.0 million), Afghanistan (2.6 million), South Sudan (2.2 million) and Myanmar (1.1 million). In a similar vein, Colombia remained the country with the highest number of internally displaced (IDPs) population standing at 8.25 million, followed by Syria (6.70 million), the Democratic Republic of Congo (5.20 million), Yemen (4.00 million), Somalia (2.97 million), Afghanistan (2.89 million), Ethiopia (2.73 million) and Nigeria (2.61 million). Other nations with an IDP population exceeding the 1 million mark at the end of the year 2020 included Sudan (2.55 million), South Sudan (1.60 million), Iraq (1.22 million), Burkina Faso (1.07 million) and Cameroon (1.03 million).

On the local front, the report pointed-out that Lebanon emerged as the host of the 2^nd highest number of refugees (when excluding Palestinian refugees) relative to its population and standing at 1 out of 8 as at end of year 2020, trailing Aruba (1 refugee in 6 inhabitants), and followed by Curacao (1 refugee in 10 inhabitants), Jordan (1 refugee in 15 inhabitants) and Turkey (1 refugee per 23 inhabitants) among others. In absolute terms, however, Lebanon ranked 6^th globally (up by one position in comparison with the previous year) in terms of number of refugees in 2020, hosting 870,418 refugees, down from 916,156 in the previous year.