Scathing Amnesty report says leaders guilty of neglect as millions face misery in ‘worst refugee crisis of our era’
Millions of refugees have been condemned to a life of misery in the worst displacement crisis since the second world war, a leading human rights organisation has said in a scathing report (pdf) that blames world leaders’ neglect for the deaths of thousands of civilians fleeing wars in the Middle East and Africa.
“We are witnessing the worst refugee crisis of our era, with millions of women, men and children struggling to survive amidst brutal wars, networks of people traffickers and governments who pursue selfish political interests instead of showing basic human compassion,” said Salil Shetty, Amnesty International’s secretary general, in a statement.
A child is lifted over border fences near the Turkish border crossing at Akcakale in Sanliurfa province. Photograph: Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images
“The refugee crisis is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century, but the response of the international community has been a shameful failure.”
The report, titled The Global Refugee Crisis: A Conspiracy of Neglect, places a particular focus on the Syrian crisis.
Almost 4 million people displaced from Syria have registered with the UN high commissioner for refugees. The burden has fallen almost entirely on the shoulders of neighbouring states, who host 95% of the refugees. In Lebanon, one in five people is a Syrian refugee, the equivalent per capita of the UK hosting nearly 13 million refugees.
With its infrastructure stretched beyond breaking point and its government in a state of disarray, Lebanon has imposed a series of restrictions on the entry of refugees that has led to an 80% drop in new registrations compared with last year, despite the continued ferocity of the Syrian civil war.
The report concluded that the countries hosting Syrian refugees have received “almost no meaningful international support”, with the UN’s humanitarian appeal to cover the costs of caring for the refugees receiving less than a quarter of the necessary funds. In Turkey, border guards used water cannon over the weekend to push back a fresh influx of refugees fleeing the fighting between Islamic State militants and Kurdish militias near the long border with Syria.
Amnesty criticised the international community for similarly failing to respond to massive displacement crises in sub-Saharan Africa, where there are an estimated 3 million refugees, including hundreds of thousands who have fled conflicts in Nigeria, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Burundi in recent years.
On the Mediterranean migrant crisis, Amnesty called on European nations to share the burden of resettling refugees, and said the scaling back of Operation Mare Nostrum – the Italian effort to handle asylum seekers fleeing to Europe by boat – had contributed to the increase in the number of people drowning.
About 3,500 people died while trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe in 2014, with 1,865 dying this year so far. The majority of those fleeing by boat are Syrians displaced by the war.
“The European governments have pushed them back into the sea rather than resettle them,” Shetty said at the report’s launch in Beirut. More generally, Shetty added, the world is “turning its back to the most vulnerable people”.
In south-east Asia, 300 refugees and migrants have died at sea due to starvation, dehydration and abuse by boat crews, with Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand initially refusing to allow boats carrying migrants to land back, putting many at risk. Amnesty castigated the Australian government in particular for “harsh, humiliating” conditions in which asylum seekers are kept when they attempt to reach the country.
Amnesty estimated the number of displaced people globally to be above 50 million, a crisis greater in magnitude than any since the second world war.
The rights group called on states to resettle 1.5 million refugees over the next five years, prioritise saving the lives of displaced people over domestic immigration policies, create a refugee fund, hold a global summit to deal with the crisis, and ratify the UN’s refugee convention.
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