Refugee Week featuring The Journey by Francesca Sanna

 A refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of:

• persecution
• war
• violence

A refugee has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of:

• race
• religion
• nationality
• political opinion or membership in a particular social group

Most likely, they cannot return home or are afraid to do so. War and ethnic, tribal and religious violence are leading causes of refugees fleeing their countries.

Two-thirds of all refugees worldwide come from just five countries: Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar and Somalia.

Source : (www.unrefugees.org)

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• A stateless person is someone who is not a citizen of any country. A person can become stateless due to a variety of reasons, including sovereign, legal, technical or administrative decisions or oversights.

• By the end of 2017 there were 25.4 million refugees in the world, 40 million internally displaced people and 3.1 million asylum-seekers. That is a total of 68.5 million individuals being forcibly displaced worldwide. An approximate equivalent to the entire population of France!
• 1 in every 110 people globally is either an asylum-seeker, internally displaced or a refugee.
• According to UNHCR statistics at the end of 2017 there were 121,837​ refugees, 40,365​ pending asylum cases and 97 stateless persons in the UK. 
• Refugees have to travel thousand of miles across the land and sea, often through dangerous and treacherous conditions. For example some refugees from Africa and the Middle East cross through the Mediterranean  Sea in poorly constructed dinghies to get to Europe. Often they also have to pay people money to be smuggled into a country.
• The world’s largest refugee camp is Kutupalong in Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh. More than a million Rohingya have fled Myanmar over the past several years. Most of them have crossed the border from Myanmar to Bangladesh and settled in the Kutupalong Refugee Camp in Cox’s Bazaar. The Rohingya are a minority Muslim community that has seen religious prosecution in Myanmar for years. In August 2017, the violence escalated. So, the Rohingya had to flee as their villages were burned down and their people were murdered. 
• Syrians continued to be the largest forcibly displaced population in the world, with 12 million people at the end of 2016. That’s more than half of the Syrian population. 

Source : (www.hias.org, www.unrefugees.org, www.raptim.org)