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Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - Only 10 countries, which account for less than 2.5 percent of world Gross Domestic Products (GDP) host around 56 percent of the world’s refugees, Amnesty International Tuesday said .

In a comprehensive assessment of the global refugee crisis the international organization said that wealthy countries have shown a complete absence of leadership and responsibility, leaving just 10 countries to take in 56 percent of the world's refugees.

Under the title "Tackling the global refugee crisis: From shirking to sharing responsibility", the new report documented the precarious situation faced by many of the world’s 21 million refugees.

It revealed that Jordan has topped the list of countries hosting refugees, where the number stood at 2.7 million, followed by Turkey 2.5 million, Pakistan1.6 million, while Lebanon hosts over 1.5 million .

Figures also showed that some countries, which are suffering from extreme poverty also host large numbers of refugees, including Ethiopia (736,000), Kenya (554,000) and Uganda 477,000.

Just 10 of the world’s 193 countries host more than half its refugees. A small number of countries have been left to do far too much just because they are neighbors to a crisis, said Amnesty International Secretary General Salil Shetty.
That situation is inherently unsustainable, exposing the millions fleeing war and persecution in countries like Syria, South Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq to intolerable misery and suffering," Shetty added.

The report highlighted the stark contrast in the number of refugees from Syria taken in by its neighbors and by other countries with similar populations. For example, the UK has taken in fewer than 8000 Syrians since 2011, while Jordan – with a population almost 10 times smaller than the UK and just 1.2 percent of its GDP – hosts more than 655,000 refugees from Syria.

Jordan is hosting more than 1.5 million Syrian refugees, but only 655,000 are registered as refugees.

The report added that unequal sharing of responsibility is exacerbating the global refugee crisis and the many problems faced by refugees. It called on all countries to accept a fair proportion of the world’s refugees, based on objective criteria that reflect their capacity to host refugees.

A basic common-sense system for assessing countries’ capacity to host refugees, based on criteria like wealth, population and unemployment, would make it clear which countries are failing to do their fair share, it explained.

The problem is not the global number of refugees, it is that many of the world’s wealthiest nations host the fewest and do the least," said Shetty.

"If every one of the wealthiest countries in the world were to take in refugees in proportion to their size, wealth and unemployment rate, finding a home for more of the world’s refugees would be an eminently solvable challenge. All that is missing is cooperation and political will," he further stated.

Today only around 30 countries run some kind of refugee resettlement program, and the number of places offered annually falls far short of the needs identified by the UN. If this increased to 60 or 90, it would make a significant impact on the crisis, the report said.

To encourage more countries to take effective action, Amnesty International called for a new mechanism for resettling vulnerable refugees and a new global transfer mechanism for acute situations like the Syrian conflict, so that neighboring countries would no longer be overwhelmed when large numbers of people flee for their lives.

"The world cannot go on leaving host countries overwhelmed because they are next to a crisis country with no support from the rest of the world. While a small number of countries host millions of refugees, many countries provide nothing at all," said Shetty.

"World leaders have completely failed to agree on a plan to protect the world’s 21 million refugees. But where leaders fail, people of good conscience must increase the pressure on governments to some humanity towards people whose only difference is that they have been forced to flee their home," Shetty concluded.