In the past two years, the world has witnessed a growing refugee crisis.

In 2013, for the first time since World War II, the number of those forcibly displaced from their homes exceeded 50 million. Millions more have since been displaced as a result of conflict and crises around the globe.

More than half of Syria’s population is displaced. Some four million women, men, and children have fled the country and are refugees, making this one of the biggest refugee crises in history. The vast majority — 95 percent — are living in the countries neighboring Syria.

In one country — Lebanon — Syrian refugees now account for one in every five people. Despite the huge influx of refugees, the host countries have received almost no meaningful international support. The UN’s humanitarian appeal for Syrian refugees was only 23 percent funded as of the June 3, 2015. Calls by the UN for the international community to resettle refugees from Syria have largely fallen on deaf ears. The total number of places offered to refugees from Syria is less than 90,000, only 2.2 percent of the refugees in the main host countries.

It is clear that the situation in Syria will not allow refugees to go home any time soon.

Africa, Intentionally Ignored

However, Syria’s neighbors are at breaking point — and some have resorted to deeply troubling measures, including denying desperate people entry to their countries and pushing people back into the conflict. While Syria is the world’s biggest refugee crisis, it is by no means the only one.

In Africa people fleeing conflict and persecution in countries like South Sudan, the Central African Republic (CAR), Nigeria, and Burundi, have added hundreds of thousands to the longstanding refugee populations from countries such as Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

There are more than three million refugees in subSaharan Africa.

Kenya is home to Dadaab — the world’s largest refugee camp, set up in 1991. Yet, the refugee situations in African countries receive little or no global attention — in 2013, less than 15,000 refugees from African countries were resettled and UN humanitarian appeals are severely underfunded. The South Sudan regional refugee response plan, for example, is only 11 percent fulfilled.

While many African countries have opened their borders to those fleeing conflict, too many refugees and migrants have faced discrimination and abuse in host states. The xenophobic attacks that took place in South Africa in April 2015, for example, left thousands of refugees and migrants displaced in that country.

In an effort to escape desperate situations refugees and migrants risk their lives; one of the starkest examples is the perilous boat journeys in the Mediterranean from North Africa to Europe.

Death Boats

In 2014 and the first three months of 2015, the largest number of people recorded attempting to cross the Mediterranean by boat to reach Southern Europe were Syrians. In April 2015, more than 1,000 people died in the space of ten days while attempting to cross the Mediterranean. As of May 31, 2015, the number of people who drowned making the boat journey from North Africa stood at 1,865, compared to 425 deaths recorded during the same period in 2014.

The dramatic increase in the number of lives lost in the Mediterranean in 2015 is partly due to the decision by Italy and the European Union (EU) to end the Italian navy operation Mare Nostrum at the end of 2014 and replace it with a much more limited EU operation.

In South East Asia in May 2015 the world witnessed harrowing scenes as fishing boats crammed with refugees and migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh were pushed back to sea by Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Desperate children, men, and women were left without food, water, and medical care for a week, before the Philippines and later Indonesia and Malaysia offered to take them in.

The Mediterranean and South East Asia crises exposed governments’ willingness to ignore legal obligations and humanitarian imperatives. In situations where lives were known to be at risk and states had the means to save them, they chose not to act for political reasons.

The lives lost were not a result of a violent conflict or an unavoidable natural disaster — most were entirely preventable deaths.

In both Europe and South East Asia, people smugglers and human traffickers have, rightly, been blamed for sending thousands to their deaths. Effectively combatting the criminals who prey on desperate people is vital, but it does not absolve governments of their responsibility to provide refugees with protection.

The global refugee crisis cannot be re-cast as a trafficking and smuggling issue by governments desperate to deflect attention from their failures. The global refugee crisis may be fuelled by conflict and persecution but it is compounded by the neglect of the international community in the face of this human suffering.

System is Broken

In the aftermath of World War II, the international community came together to create the United Nations Refugee Convention to protect people from being returned to countries were they risked persecution and human rights abuses.

The Refugee Convention has been an important mechanism, providing a framework for the protection of tens of millions of people. The Refugee Convention also established the principle of responsibility and burden-sharing – the idea that the international community must work together to address refugee crises so that no one country, or a small number of countries, has to cope by themselves.

This fundamental principle is now being ignored, with devastating consequences: the international refugee protection system is broken.

• 86 percent of the world’s refugees are in developing countries. Some of these countries host hundreds of thousands of people. Turkey, Lebanon, and Pakistan each host more than one million refugees. There is a clearly disproportionate burden on a small number of countries;
• Nearly one million refugees need resettlement or other forms of humanitarian admission — whereby the most vulnerable refugees in a country are offered residency in another county where they would receive better assistance. Yet, global annual resettlement commitments are less than a tenth of this number;
• Although 145 countries have ratified the Refugee Convention, there are regions of the world in which very few countries have ratified the treaty, including most of the Middle East, South Asia, and South East Asia. In these countries refugees generally enjoy limited rights and in some cases cannot even be legally recognized as refugees;
• Xenophobic and racist discourse has been normalized in many countries, with certain media outlets and politicians blaming refugees and migrants for economic and social problems.

The global refugee crisis will not be solved unless the international community recognizes that it is a global problem and deals with it as such.

Refugees are — by definition — people who no longer enjoy the protection of their state because that state will not or cannot protect them. They are people who have fled armed conflict, persecution, violence, and grave human rights abuses.

The briefing paper looks at the global refugee crisis — from Lebanon to Kenya, the Andaman Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. It calls for a global response to what has become one of the defining challenges of the 21^st century.

A Much-Needed Paradigm Shift

The current approaches to the world’s many refugee crises are failing — and the toll in lives lost and lives blighted is far higher than many armed conflicts. A paradigm shift is needed: Amnesty International is setting out a proposal to significantly reinvigorate the system for refugee protection and burden sharing amongst states.

Amnesty International believes that a paradigm shift on refugee protection must include eight key actions by the international community:

• An international summit on the global refugee crisis focused on increasing international responsibility and burden sharing;
• Global ratification of the Refugee Convention;
• Develop robust domestic refugee systems: states must have fair domestic procedures to assess refugee claims and must guarantee fundamental rights and access to services, such as education and healthcare, to refugees;
• An absolute commitment to saving lives first: states must prioritize saving people in distress over implementing immigration policies. In situations where people are in danger of death, including — but not limited to — people attempting sea crossings, states should invest in search and rescue operations and immediately come to the rescue of people in distress. This imperative should never be trumped by any border control objectives;
• Combat trafficking: states must take effective action to investigate and prosecute trafficking gangs. States should offer protection and assistance to victims of trafficking and ensure they have access to refugee status determination procedures and/or resettlement opportunities;
• Fulfill all resettlement needs identified by UNHCR: nearly one million resettlement and humanitarian admission places are required for refugees who need resettlement and this number will increase every year. Amnesty International estimates that, 300,000 annual resettlement and humanitarian admission places will be needed every year over the next four years;
• Combat xenophobia: governments must refrain from engaging in xenophobia themselves, for example by implying or directly claiming asylum-seekers and migrants are to blame for economic and social problems. Governments must also have effective policies to address xenophobic violence;
• Establish a global refugee fund: such a fund should fulfill all UN humanitarian appeals for refugee crises. This fund should also provide meaningful financial support to countries hosting large numbers of refugees to help them provide services to refugees and their host communities. This should be additional to existing development aid.