UNHCR 2014 Statistical Yearbook

From the UNHCR

Dear colleague,

I am pleased to announce the release of the 2014 Statistical Yearbook, which is now available and may be downloaded from the UNHCR website.

The 14th edition of the Statistical Yearbook reports that 59.5 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide due to persecution and conflict at the end of 2014, the highest number in the post-World War II era. Some 19.5 million people were refugees, 14.4 million under UNHCR’s mandate and 5.1 million Palestinian refugees registered by UNRWA. The global figure includes 38.2 million internally displaced persons and 1.8 million asylum-seekers.

In addition to global trends in populations of concern to UNHCR, the Yearbook includes chapters covering methodological issues, durable solutions and new displacement, asylum and refugee status determination, and the demographic characteristics and locations of populations of concern. It also includes a chapter outlining the relevance of UNHCR’s recently released Policy on the Protection of Personal Data of Persons of Concern to UNHCR to its statistical activities.

In line with previous editions, three external contributions are included in this year’s Statistical Yearbook.

1) A contribution by three statisticians from Statistics Norway, focusing on the importance of national censuses in determining the magnitude of forced displacement. This section is based on a review of some 150 census questionnaires in the 2010 World Population and Housing Census Programme, analyzing whether these documents have included refugees, asylum-seekers, or internally displaced persons.

2) Civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) are increasingly gaining interest at the international level, with a significant number of countries having committed to improving these systems. The Yearbook includes a contribution by an independent researcher (formerly with Statistics Norway) on the importance of CRVS in the refugee context.

3) Attempts to harmonize asylum statistics in the European Union pose important challenges; some of these are presented in a contribution by the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) on its work with the ‘Group for the Provision of Statistics.’

Two special statistical infographics have been developed for the 2014 Yearbook depicting historical refugee statistics. They are available here and here and as stand-alone posters at the UNHCR statistics website (http://www.unhcr.org/statistics) together with infographics of previous Yearbook editions.

Sincerely,

Tarek Abou Chabake
Senior Statistician
UNHCR Geneva

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