page_title: Refugee
section_title: Refugee crisis
hierarchical_section_title: Refugee / Refugee crisis
caption_attribution_description: English: Refugee camp at the St. Mary Help of Christians Cathedral of Wau town.
context_page_description: A refugee, generally speaking, is a displaced person who has been forced to cross national boundaries and who cannot return home safely. Such a person may be called an asylum seeker until granted refugee status by the contracting state or the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees if they formally make a claim for asylum.
  The lead international agency coordinating refugee protection is the United Nations Office of the UNHCR. The United Nations has a second Office for refugees, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency or UNRWA, which is solely responsible for supporting the large majority of Palestinian refugees.
context_section_description: Refugee crisis can refer to movements of large groups of displaced persons, who could be either internally displaced persons, refugees or other migrants. It can also refer to incidents in the country of origin or departure, to large problems whilst on the move or even after arrival in a safe country that involve large groups of displaced persons.
  In 2018, the United Nations estimated the number of forcibly displaced people to be 68.5 million worldwide. Of those, 25.4 million are refugees while 40 million are internally displaced within a nation state and 3.1 million are classified as asylum seekers. 85% of refugees are hosted in developed countries, with 57% coming from Syria, Afghanistan and South Sudan. Turkey is the top hosting country of refugees with 3.5 million displaced people within its borders.
  In 2006, there were 8.4 million UNHCR registered refugees worldwide, the lowest number since 1980. At the end of 2015, there were 16.1 million refugees worldwide. When adding the 5.2 million Palestinian refugees who are under UNRWA's mandate there were 21.3 million refugees worldwide. The overall forced displacement worldwide has reached a total of 65.3 million displaced persons at the end of 2015, while it was 59.5 million 12 months earlier. One in every 113 people globally is an asylum seeker or a refugee. In 2015, the total number of displaced people worldwide, including refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced persons, was at its highest level on record.
  Among them, Syrian refugees were the largest group in 2015 at 4.9 million. In 2014, Syrians had overtaken Afghan refugees (2.7 million), who had been the largest refugee group for three decades. Somalis were the third largest group with one million. The countries hosting the largest number of refugees according to UNHCR were Turkey (2.5 million), Pakistan (1.6 million), Lebanon (1.1 million) and Iran (1 million). the countries that had the largest numbers of internally displaced people were Colombia at 6.9, Syria at 6.6 million and Iraq at 4.4 million.
  Children were 51% of refugees in 2015 and most of them were separated from their parents or travelling alone. In 2015, 86 per cent of the refugees under UNHCR's mandate were in low and middle-income countries that themselves are close to situations of conflict. Refugees have historically tended to flee to nearby countries with ethnic kin populations and a history of accepting other co-ethnic refugees. The religious, sectarian and denominational affiliation has been an important feature of debate in refugee-hosting nations.
caption: Refugee camp in South Sudan, 2016
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