One person out of every 115 people alive today is a refugee or displaced person. They live in every country in the world, but today most refugees and displaced people live in the poorer countries of Africa or Asia.

Refugees:

There are about 12 million refugees in the world, having fled from many different countries. Three quarters live in the poorer parts of the world, Europe looks after 22% of the total.

Refugees are ordinary people who have fled from their own countries because of war, or because their religion, political beliefs, ethnic group or way of life puts them in danger of arrest, torture or death.

These people have left their home country and cannot go back there, although most refugees prefer to return to their home as soon as it is safe. Often they have to wait until a conflict or a war has ended in their country, and the basic necessities of life have been restored.

Displaced People:

Around 25 to 30 million people have fled from their homes because their lives are in danger, but have gone into hiding in their home country. This group of people are called displaced people. They have fled from their homes for the same reasons as refugees. The difference between displaced people and refugees is that refugees have left their own countries.

Asylum Seekers:

When people flee their own country, they apply for the right to be recognised as refugees in the country they have fled to. This is called seeking asylum. If they are granted asylum, they then have the right to be protected by the law and cared for financially by that country.

It is always hard to say exactly how many people in the world are seeking asylum, since they are often doing so in the middle of wars and chaos. It is probably about 1 million people.

In the last fifty years several million people were granted asylum in different countries around the world. As travel and communication has become easier there has been an increase in the number of people seeking asylum. Europe experienced particularly large numbers of people seeking asylum during the Balkan crisis in the 1990's. Because of the increase, many countries have made it harder for asylum seekers to be granted asylum. In Europe, the member states of the European Union have been working for several years to reach an agreement on their asylum procedures.

Resettlement:

Some refugees cannot or are unwilling to return home, usually because they would still be persecuted if they did. They are helped to find new homes, either in the asylum country where they are living or in another country where they can stay and make a new home. Sometimes countries are willing to accept refugees in emergencies, but there are only about twelve countries who will offer some refugees a permanent new home.

The first table has figures from the recent past to show that the places refugees escape from keep changing, as old wars and crises end, and new ones begin. The second table has some information about where refugees have been escaping from more recently. All these figures come from the United Nations.

ORIGIN OF MAJOR REFUGEE POPULATIONS IN 1999 [ten largest groups]

ASYLUM APPLICATIONS SUBMITTED IN SELECTED COUNTRIES in 2005

MAIN COUNTRIES OF RESETTLEMENT OF REFUGEES in 2003

It is a myth that Britain takes more refugees than other countries in Europe. During the 1990s we took only 1.9 refugees for every 1000 people in our population. Austria took in 4.6 per 1000, Norway 3.9, Sweden 3.7, and Ireland 3.1. Measured this way, Britain ranked only 8th in Europe. But it varies from year to year, and in fact most European countries have about three refugees to every 1000 of their population.