Number of refugees worldwide reaches 5th consecutive record

In 2018, there were around 70 million displaced people and the number of requests for refugee status in Brazil was less than 1%

According to UNHCR (The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights for Refugees) data, published on Wednesday 19th, in 2018 around 70 million people worldwide were forced to leave their homes, abandoning their towns and even the countries they lived in to flee wars, persecution and other forms of violence.

The report Global Trends, published every year, shows that, on average a daily rate of 37 thousand people migrated, fleeing from violence and intolerance, last year.

This is the fifth consecutive record number of refugees per year, exceeding the 2017 figures by 2.9 million people. This year, some of the principal reasons were the crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the war in South Sudan and the flight of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people to Bangladesh from Myanmar.

The report also indicates that most of the refugees live in urban areas (58%), not in the countryside or rural areas and that the displaced global population is young – 54% are children, including many who are unaccompanied or have been separated from their families.

Brazil

The 2018 data on the number of requests for refugee status in the country has not yet been published by the Ministry for Justice, however, according to information from Conare (National Committee for Refugees), in 2017 Brazil received 33,866 requests for refugee status. This number represents 0.05% of the number of people forcibly displaced worldwide in the year.

Over 17 thousand of these requests were from Venezuelan citizens and around 2 thousand from Cubans. From the highest to the lowest number: Haitians (2,362), Angolans (2,036), Chinese (1,462), Senegalese (1,221), Syrians (823), Nigerians (549) and other nationalities.

In the last seven years, Brazil has received 126 thousand requests for refugee status. Up to the end of 2017, only 8% (10,145 thousand) of these requests had been attended to.

In 2017, 587 people were granted recognition, 310 Syrians, 106 Congolese, 50 Palestinians, 24 Pakistanis, 16 Egyptians, eight Iraqis and a number of other nationalities.