EUROPE/SWITZERLAND - The number of refugees worldwide increases, half are children

Geneva (Agenzia Fides) - A report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was announced recently in Geneva, in which the great concern over the dangerous wave of mass forced displacement worldwide emerges, which involves almost 60 million people, of whom more than half are children. The phenomenon continues to grow rapidly and is at a level never recorded so far by UNHCR. The report exposes a sharp increase of people forced to flee their homes, leaving families, cities due to wars, conflicts and persecutions. Of these, more than half are children without any hope of a decent future. At the end of 2014 there was a total of almost 60 million forcibly displaced persons, compared to 51 million in the previous year. The most sudden increase of refugees occured in early 2011, when the war broke out in Syria, which caused the highest number of displaced people around the world. In 2014, a daily average of 42 thousand 500 people became refugees, asylum seekers or internally displaced persons. (AP) (Agenzia Fides 19/06/2015)