World Refugee Day

Displacement in the 21st Century. A new paradigm

The refugee challenge in the 21st century is changing rapidly. People are forced to flee their homes for increasingly complicated and interlinked reasons. Some 40 million people worldwide are already uprooted by violence and persecution, and it is likely that the future will see more people on the run as a growing number of push factors compound one another to create conditions for further forced displacement.

Today people do not just flee persecution and war but also injustice, exclusion, environmental pressures, competition for scarce resources and all the miserable human consequences of dysfunctional states.
The task facing the international community in this new environment is to find ways to unlock the potential of refugees who have so much to offer if they are given the opportunity to regain control over their lives.

As World Refugee Day, marked on June 20, approaches, refugees in Turkey are faced with many difficulties.

In Turkey, asylum seekers have to wait four years on average to begin a new life in a third country and, during these four years, they don't have the means to integrate into Turkish society or find work. In theory, they are not allowed to travel within Turkey. Meanwhile, for their residence permits they have to pay YTL 370 every six months, and usually they don't have means to do this.
According to statistics from the Turkey office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the number of registered asylum seekers who are waiting in Turkey to be placed with a third country was 19,594 at the end of May of this year. Nearly 5,800 of them are women. During the first four months of this year the UNHCR was able to find a third country for just 2,667 refugees.
Although the nationalities of the asylum seekers and refugees vary over time, at the end of April, 41 percent were Iraqis, 31 percent were Iranians, 11 percent were Somalis and 7 percent were Afghanis.