GINEBRA.-The head of the UN refugee agency says he is aware that the president’s government Joe Biden implemented new restrictions on asylum seekers entering USAbut warned that some aspects of the executive order could violate refugee protections required under international law.
Filippo Grandi, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, spoke to The Associated Press as his agency on Thursday released its annual “Global Trends” report for 2023. He found that the cumulative number of people who have been forced to Forced displacement rose to 120 million people that year, 6 million more than the previous year.
The UNHCR noted that the total figure was roughly equivalent to the entire population of Japan.
The agency’s report found that three-quarters of those forcibly displaced people — including refugees who had to go abroad and people displaced within their own country — lived in poor or middle-income nations. Grandi insisted that this was an indication of how the flows of migrants and refugees were not only a problem for the world of rich countries.
He lamented how crises in Africa have been largely overlooked, particularly in Sudan, where some 10.8 million people were displaced by the end of 2023 after conflict broke out between forces loyal to rival generals in April. of that year.
Grandi said the world’s attention to the crises facing refugees and internally displaced people has been focused primarily on Gaza — where a devastating and deadly conflict erupted in October last year — and on Ukraine, which has suffered from Russia’s invasion. from February 2022.
He also lamented how the world has largely ignored the refugee crisis generated by the conflict in Sudan.
Meanwhile, the United States has faced “the most complex challenge” when it comes to refugees of any country in the developed world, Grandi added, referring to the arrival of large numbers of people at the border with Mexico.
The UNHCR director criticized the Biden administration’s plans to implement new restrictions on migrants seeking asylum at the border — which some say are a political maneuver ahead of national elections in November — as a possible violation of international humanitarian law. .
However, he acknowledged that the Biden administration’s ambitions to resettle some 125,000 refugees in the United States amounted to “a very shining example of American generosity.”
In the United States, a coalition of migrant advocacy groups sued the government on Wednesday over the recent directive on asylum applications at the southern border, arguing that it is not unlike a similar action under Donald Trump’s presidency that the courts They blocked.
Grandi also highlighted the difficulties faced by refugees and internally displaced people amid conflicts in countries such as Congo and Myanmar, and noted that Syria remains the country with the largest displacement crisis in the world, with almost 14 million people forced to go abroad or to another place within Syrian territory.
