Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. We are delighted to come back to this committee.
Thank you very much for the attention you are giving to the issue of forced displacement.
As a UN refugee agency I will not speak to the issue of migration, but I will focus immediately on forcible displacement. We are distributing some handouts, in French and in English, which contain a lot of data. I will introduce the main points now.
Let's start with the big number. We have 68.5 million forcibly displaced as we speak. That has doubled since 2012. Among them we have 25 million refugees, or those who have been displaced and who crossed an international border to seek safety in a different country. This is an increase of three million between 2016 and 2017. We went from 22 million in 2016 to 25 million in 2017. It's the largest increase in refugees ever witnessed in a single year. It shows the magnitude of the problem.
To look at the root causes, let me look at the five largest countries producing refugees: Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar and Somalia. What they certainly have in common is that they are all plagued by generalized violence and conflict: political, ethnic and interfaith conflict. Some situations are very old. With Afghanistan, we are speaking about the 1970s and 1980s; with Somalia, the 1990s. Some are far more recent. South Sudan gained its independence in 2011. There was a lot of hope, and now we are witnessing major.... One-third of the population in South Sudan has been displaced. If we look at Myanmar, the root causes of statelessness are found in the 1960s, but we have seen an increase in August and September of last year of 700,000 Rohingya who crossed into Bangladesh. We have protracted crises and we have more recent situations.
If you look at the countries hosting those refugees, the top three are Turkey, Pakistan and Uganda. The Syrian situation has biased our optics on the situation a little and made us often forget that the majority of the displaced are still in sub-Saharan Africa. It is also interesting that among the top 10 countries, the first OECD country you will find is Germany, at number six, in terms of the number of refugees that country has received. However, although the media and some of the policies at the international level are very driven by a western approach, 85% of the refugees remain in the global south, and remain in the countries neighbouring conflict situations.
I want to draw the attention of the committee to situations that are a bit closer to home: the north of Central America. At the end of 2017, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras had more than 300,000 asylum seekers and refugees in the region. It's a shocking increase of 58% from the previous year. What may be even more important to know is that the United States has a backlog of 790,000 claims for asylum, of which the overwhelming majority are from those three countries in the north of Central America.
If we look at more recent events, we also have Venezuela. Since 2015, 1.5 million Venezuelans have left their country for different reasons, including some related to violence and protection risks. The Venezuelan situation is growing. Five thousand people leave the country every day, as we speak. It's putting a lot of pressure on the neighbouring countries, Colombia and Brazil, and now it has gone south to Peru.
Nicaragua is another situation of political instability that we are looking at. It's driving out a large number of Nicaraguans, particularly to Costa Rica.
Those situations of conflict and generalized violence should not make us forget that refugees can be individuals in non-conflict situations who are persecuted because of who they are or what they do. Here, we are speaking about journalists who may be reporting about corruption in their countries. We are speaking about human rights defenders. We are speaking about indigenous leaders, political opponents and the LGBTI community, but also about ethnic and religious minorities and, simply, women at risk who are not able to gain the safety they deserve when they are survivors of domestic violence or rape and they turn to the authorities of their country—police or judicial authorities—and do not receive the protections they are entitled to.
To look at the refugee situation, we need to also look at the 44 million who are internally displaced, those who have been forced to move from their homes but have not crossed an international border. Here, I think it's very important to show that some of the countries are the same as the ones I mentioned before in terms of refugees—Syria, Iraq, Somalia—but some are completely different.
The number one country with the largest internally displaced population is Colombia. There, we are really speaking about a long-term conflict between the FARC and the government and other non-state actors.
We are also speaking about Ukraine, a country that is important in Canada and is the number 10 country in terms of internal displacement. We don't see a lot of Ukrainian refugees, but we see a lot of internal displacement in Ukraine.
Yemen is an interesting case, because in Yemen you don't have a lot of Yemeni refugees. It's extremely difficult to leave Yemen. For those here who have the map, you can see that they don't have a lot of opportunities to get out. We don't have so many IDPs, internally displaced people, at two million, but we have 22 million people who depend on United Nations and NGO support to survive.
We need to always keep in mind that there's a correlation between internal displacement and refugee situations, but we have to go a bit deeper to see that in some of those situations people are not displaced. Either they don't even have the means to be displaced, or the generalization of the conflict, which at any point can create forcible movement of the population, does not allow them to move, but they're still in need of humanitarian assistance.
Because we have appeared before this committee, you know well what are the role and function of UNHCR. I've provided in the briefing some examples about Uganda, where some of you went, and our responses in Bangladesh and in Tanzania for the Burundians. We address all aspects of the lives of refugees: maternal health, birth registration, SGBV survivors, water, sanitation, education, shelter and so on. For the internally displaced, our mandate, as divided within the United Nations, is restricted to protection, shelter and the management of the sites where the IDPs are located.
All of that has a cost. For the first time in the history of UNHCR, we went up to an $8-billion ask in terms of our funding requirement. We usually receive 50% of the money. We will probably get, at the end of the year, around $4 billion, which means that one out of two needs can be addressed. Eighty-seven per cent of the money comes from voluntary contributions from member states. I think it's important here to note that we have three main donors that account for 60% of the budget of UNHCR: the United States, Germany and the European Union.
It's important also to dig a bit into the numbers in terms of understanding the forcible displacement because, depending on the location of the crisis, the funding differs a lot. The Syria-Iraq operation received approximately 60% of the funding that is required. When you go to sub-Saharan Africa, we receive between 30% and 40% of the funding. In some of those operations, it doesn't go up to 20%, such as with the Burundians in Tanzania. If you go to Central America, which is a growing crisis with Venezuela, Nicaragua and the north of Central America, we always end the year at around 20% of the funding we need to assist the people.
That has no influence, because if people are not assisted in the first country where they find asylum, you can well imagine they will continue their route to get to another country where they will have access to medical care, be able to put their children in school, and have proper shelter.
If we briefly turn to the solutions we have, the situation is pretty grim. Between 1996 and 2005, we had approximately 30 million refugees who were able to go back home. We are speaking about Afghanistan, where after 2002 some 3.5 million people returned. I was posted to Afghanistan in 2008. By 2008 the return had stopped because, again, there was an increased level of violence, particularly in the south of the country.
Referring to Liberia and Angola, we saw a peaceful transition of power where people were able to return. If you look at the period 2007-17, it's only four million refugees who have been able to return home, so it dropped to one-third of the previous decade. This is mainly because the international community has been unable to broker peace, and to re-establish functioning societies and authorities which would mean that refugees would feel confident to go back home.
Interestingly, we have recently seen efforts between Eritrea and Ethiopia to resume diplomatic relations. What is interesting in that case is that you would imagine that a number of Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia would have returned to Eritrea; however, it is actually the opposite. What we have seen is an increase of women and children crossing into Ethiopia because they want to be reunited with their families. Before, it was extremely dangerous for those categories of people to cross into Ethiopia. Ultimately, if the peace holds, and if investment is made in Eritrea in terms of the forced military service and so on, we know—we have already asked—the Eritrean refugees would want to go back, so there is the prospect for return.
In terms of local integration, accepting refugees who are in your territory to become citizens of your country is less and less an option. The new prime minister of Pakistan recently made an announcement that he would consider giving Pakistani nationality to 1.2 million Afghans. That didn't last more than 24 hours. There was a political backlash and the Afghan refugees will remain Afghan refugees. Some 60% of the Afghan refugees were either born in Pakistan or they came to Pakistan before the age of 12. That was the rationale for the prime minister to say that since those people have known only Pakistan in their lives, they would be given nationality, but it is something that does not happen very much these days, except perhaps in Latin America. In 2014 we had some naturalization in Tanzania for some Burundians, but that has also stopped.
The last solution is, of course, resettlement. We are extremely grateful to Canada for its leadership in providing this solution. We do resettle refugees based on their extreme urgent needs. Here we are really speaking about people who have a protection concern, maybe people who are at risk of being arrested, or being sent back to their country of origin where they may be at risk of torture, arbitrary detention, and so on. We are speaking about SGBV and torture survivors, or children and women who may be at risk of not being able to survive in the country where they first found asylum.
We have identified 1.4 million out of the 25 million who need to be resettled to a third country such as Canada. Based on the identification of UNHCR, Canada will resettle 10,000 of those refugees this year. We need to flag here that the need for resettlement, with the increase of the refugee population, has also increased in a parallel fashion. We have doubled since 2014, but between 2016 and 2017 we have lost 50% of the spaces due to the fact that the U.S. has reduced drastically the number of people to be resettled to the United States.
To go back to my initial point, let's not forget that while the Syrians are the largest nationality in need of resettlement, if you look at geographical groups, it's the sub-Saharan Africans who account for 45% of all the resettlement needs. You will see that in your handout we have also put our latest op-ed, which was issued by Maclean's a few days ago with the honourable Minister Bibeau and Minister Hussen, which explains a bit how the international community is now looking at providing solutions to refugees through what is called the global compact on refugees, which has been presented by the commissioner to the General Assembly as we speak and which we trust will be adopted before the end of the year. I'll stop there.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
