GENEVA: Refugees fleeing persecution too often face restrictions on their right to seek asylum, with the debate around protection becoming increasingly politicized, the United Nations warned Tuesday.<\/p>\n
UN refugees chief Barham Salih urged the world to move from managing sky-high displacement to seeking to resolve it, at an event marking the 75th anniversary of the Refugee Convention.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe gather at a time of increasingly politicized debates about refugees and asylum,\u201d said Iraqi ex-president Salih, himself a former refugee.<\/p>\n
\u201cToo often, people forced to flee become scapegoats for wider social, economic and political anxieties,\u201d he said at the UN\u2019s Palais des Nations in Geneva, where the convention was opened for signature on July 28, 1951.<\/p>\n
\u201cToo often, refugees are portrayed as burdens or threats rather than as fellow human beings.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some 117.8 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced from their homes at the end of 2025, according to UNHCR, the UN refugee agency \u2014 down from 2024\u2019s record 123.2 million.<\/p>\n
Of those 117.8 million, 35.6 million were refugees under UNHCR\u2019s mandate, with two-thirds coming from Venezuela, Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan and Sudan.<\/p>\n
Last year\u2019s drop was the first in a decade, as conflicts in Iran and Lebanon spurred many refugees hosted there to return home, often under risky circumstances, including to Syria and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
GENEVA: Refugees fleeing persecution too often face restrictions on their right to seek asylum, with the debate around protection becoming increasingly politicized, the United Nations warned Tuesday. UN refugees chief Barham Salih urged the world to move from managing sky-high displacement to seeking to resolve it, at an event marking the 75th anniversary of the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":100954,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100941"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100956,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100941\/revisions\/100956"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}