There are six Maltese refugees or asylum-seekers in the world, according to a global annual report by the UN refugee agency.
These are testing times
No details are given about where these refugees live, when they applied for such status or why.
Last year’s report also said there were six refugees who originated from Malta but said another was seeking asylum.
Malta gives protection to 6,952 people in “refugee-like” situations, apart from another 1,457 people whose asylum applications are still pending.
The information emerges from two tables included in the Global Trends report to be published today, which sheds light on global migration patterns throughout 2011, dubbed the “year of crises”.
Conflicts in Côte d’Ivoire, Libya, Somalia and Sudan alone forced more than 800,000 refugees to neighbouring countries.
In all, 4.3 million people were “newly displaced” last year, the highest number since 2000.
With most of these displacements happening far away from Europe, immigration to Malta received little attention in the report, except to say that an estimated 1,500 potential asylum seekers drowned or went missing while attempting to cross the Mediterranean last year.
This makes it the “deadliest” year in the Mediterranean since UNHCR began collecting records in 2006.
Although the Libyan crisis features prominently in the annual report, the focus is placed on Tunisia, which received an estimated 150,000 Libyans who fled when the armed conflict broke out.
Almost all of them had returned to Libya by the end of the year.
The year ended with 42.5 million people worldwide either as refugees (15 million), internally displaced persons (26 million) or asylum seekers (895,000). Despite the high number of new refugees, the overall figure was lower than the 2010 total of 43.7 million people, due mainly to the offsetting effect of large numbers of internally displaced people returning home.
UN High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres said that 2011 saw suffering on an “epic scale”.
“We can be grateful only that the international system for protecting such people held firm for the most part and borders remained open. These are testing times,” he said.
Overall, Afghanistan remains the biggest refugee producer (2.7 million) followed by Iraq (1.4 million), Somalia (1.1 million), Sudan (500,000) and Congo (491,000).
Around four-fifths of the world’s refugees flee to neighbouring countries, reflected in the large refugee populations seen in Pakistan (1.7 million), Iran (886,500), Kenya (566,500) and Chad (366,500).
Among industrialised countries, Germany ranks as the largest hosting country with 571,700 refugees.
South Africa was the largest recipient of individual asylum applications (107,000), a status it has held for the past four years.