UN Reports 112.6 Million Forcibly Displaced By June 2024, Including 43.7 Million Refugees

By the end of June 2024, 112.6 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced due to persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations and events seriously disturbing public order, including 43.7 million refugees, 72.1 million internally displaced people, and 8 million asylum-seekers.

“Ankara — Citizenship, residency, refugees, and the fight against terrorism are at the forefront of public discussion in Turkey, amid rapid political and security shifts in the country and the region”

Al-Jazeera Net

The UN’s definition of a refugee is tied to “well-founded fear of persecution” for reasons including race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, and it specifies that a person is outside the country of their nationality or, if stateless, outside the country of former habitual residence.

Al-Jazeera Net

The UN also says that in the first half of 2024, the main drivers behind the rise in the number of refugees were ongoing displacement from Sudan and Ukraine.

It adds that by mid-2024, a little over one-third of all refugees under UNHCR’s mandate, as well as other people in need of international protection, were in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Turkey, Colombia, Germany and Uganda.

The same source states that “the rise in displacement far outpaces solutions,” contrasting an average of 1.5 million refugees returning home each year in the 1990s with about 385,000 in the last decade.

Orient XXI says Turkey hosts three of the five million people who fled Syria and that, according to UNHCR data, nearly three million Syrian refugees are in Turkey, making it the world’s leading host country for refugees.

It describes Ankara’s shift from an initial phase where humanitarian concerns prevailed and Turkey rejected aid or foreign interference to a later phase where the war’s prolongation and continued outflow at its borders pushed Turkey to internationalize the issue.

CADTM

The article says camps host little more than 10 percent of refugees, while most are dispersed in cities and “mingled with Turkish society,” and it links that dispersion to pressure on real estate and labor-market competition.

It also says Turkey has lobbied the United Nations and major international powers to create on Syrian soil a security zone and to keep refugees in their own country.

In a separate account, Al Jazeera Net frames Turkish Interior Minister Mustafa Çiftçi’s stance on Syrian refugees alongside other security issues, describing “Ankara — Citizenship, residency, refugees, and the fight against terrorism” as central to public discussion.

Al Jazeera Net reports that Turkish Interior Minister Mustafa Çiftçi said the citizenship-by-investment program began in 2017, with the first cases granted in 2018.

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Le Courrier des Balkans

The interview states that “to date, 174,567 people have obtained Turkish citizenship” under this framework, including 51,762 investors and 122,805 of their family members, and it adds that investments totaling 16.074 billion dollars were attracted to Turkey.

It also says 943 applications were rejected for not meeting the conditions, and that there are still 4,329 applications from investors whose procedures are ongoing.

Çiftçi told Al Jazeera Net that exceptional citizenship requests are decided within the Turkish Citizenship Law No. 5901 framework and that “exceptional citizenship does not mean a path that automatically leads to a result.”

He further said opposition claims that exceptional citizenships would be revoked upon coming to power are “not a legal fact but political rhetoric,” and he argued that citizenship acquired later cannot be revoked by arbitrary or mass decisions.