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On the 19th of June the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) released its annual report on “Global Trends on forced displacement” for 2016. The report collects the yearly data on the different categories of people affected by forced displacement: refugees, returned refugees, asylum seekers, Internal Displaced People (IDPs), returned IDPs, stateless people and other persons of concern to UNHCR.
Forced displacement worldwide at its highest in decades. UNHCR’s annual Global Trends report says an unprecedented 65.6 million people were uprooted from their homes by conflict and persecution at the end of 2016, which is an increase of 300,000 from 2015. This is a record number, higher than the previous record set in 2015. The distribution of this number among the categories of the report shows that that 22.5 million are refugees, 40.3 million are IDPs, 2.8 million are asylum seekers, and finally 3.2 million reported stateless people – however, the total number of stateless people is estimated to be 10 million.
