Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - The number of refugees in the world reached almost 60 million in 2014, where more than half of them were children, according to the annual report of the UN High Commission for Refugees.

A whopping 59.5 million individuals were displaced from their homes worldwide at the end of 2014, "as a result of persecution, conflict, generalised violence, or human rights violations," the report showed.

"We are witnessing a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen before," said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres in a statement.

More than half of the world's refugees are children, up from 41 percent in 2009, while the total number of people who fled their homes has spiked by 40 percent in just three years.

At the end of 2014, the world's top host for refugees was Turkey, sheltering 1.8 million people.