‘Refugees facing walls of xenophobia’

A record 65.3 million people were uprooted worldwide in 2015, many of them fleeing wars only to face walls, tougher laws and xenophobia as they reach borders, the United Nations refugee agency said on Monday.

The figure, which jumped from 59.5 million in 2014 and by 50 per cent in five years, means that 1 in every 113 people on the planet is now a refugee, asylum-seeker or internally displaced in a home country.

Fighting in Syria, Afg-hanistan, Burundi and South Sudan has driven the latest exodus, bringing the total number of refugees to 21.3 million, half of them children, the UNHCR said in its “Global Trends” report marking World Refugee Day.

“The refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean and arriving on the shores of Europe, the message that they have carried is that if you don’t solve problems, problems will come to you,” UN High Commissioner for refugees Filippo Grandi said. “It’s painful that it has taken so long for people in the rich countries to understand that,” he said. “We need action, political action to stop conflicts, that would be the most important prevention of refugee flows.”

A record 2 million new asylum claims were lodged in industrialised countries in 2015, the report said. Nearly 1,00,000 were children unaccompanied or separated from their families, a three-fold rise on 2014 and a historic high.

Germany, where one in three applicants was Syrian, led with 4,41,900 claims, followed by the United States with 1,72,700, many of them fleeing gang and drug-related violence in Mexico and Central America. Developing regions still host 86 per cent of the world’s refugees, led by Turkey with 2.5 million Syrians, followed by Pakistan and Lebanon, the report said.

Asylum-seekers fleeing conflicts or persecution are increasingly confronted with walls or anti-foreigner sentiment, Mr Grandi said. “The rise of xenophob-ia is unfortunately bec-oming a very defining feature of the environment in which we work.

“Barriers are rising everywhere — and I’m not just talking of walls. But I’m talking about legislative barriers that are coming up, including in countries that have for long defended the fundamental rights linked to asylum.”