The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) recently released a report titled “Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2023”, 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 117.3 million people were forcibly displaced in 2023, in comparison with 108.4 million a year before. To put things into perspective, this number implies that 1 out of 69 people on earth is considered to be displaced compared to 1 out of 74 people in the year 2022. The UNHCR has broken down the number of displaced individuals into four main categories namely, internally displaced persons (67.1 million; 57.18%), refugees (37.6 million; 32.06%), asylum seekers (6.9 million; 5.85%) and people in need of protection (5.8 million, 4.91%).

The report commented that the majority of refugees around the world comes from Afghanistan (6.4 million) followed by Syria (6.4 million), Venezuela (6.1 million), Ukraine (6.0 million) and South Sudan (1.5 million). In addition, Sudan recorded the highest number of internally displaced (IDPs) population standing at 9.1 million, followed by Syria (7.2 million), Colombia (6.9 million) the Democratic Republic of Congo (6.3 million) and Yemen (4.5 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 standing at 1 out of 6 as at end of year 2023, trailing Aruba (1 refugee in 5 inhabitants), and followed by Montenegro (1 refugee in 9 inhabitants), Curacao (1 refugee in 13 inhabitants) and Jordan (1 refugee per 16 inhabitants) among others. In absolute terms, however, Lebanon hosted 784,900 refugees in 2023, down from 818,900 in the previous year.