Refugee Week is held each year, providing an opportunity to highlight aspects of the refugee experience and help the broader community to understand what it is like to be a refugee.
This year, Refugee Week runs from Sunday 19 June to Saturday 25 June. Healing is the theme of Refugee Week 2022. This theme builds on a recognition of the importance of human connections, which has been underscored by the current pandemic.
The website for this year’s Refugee Week says, “Mainstream and refugee communities alike can draw upon shared hardship to heal wounds, to learn from each other and to move forward. Healing can occur through storytelling, through community and also through realisation of our intrinsic interconnectedness as individuals.”
The first Refugee Week events were organised in Sydney in 1986 by Austcare (Australians Caring for Refugees). Austcare’s mission is to assist refugees overseas, displaced people and those affected by landmines to rebuild their lives, through the expert delivery of development programs in partnership with local communitities and other agencies.
In 1987, the Refugee Council of Australia (RCOA) became a co-organiser of the week, and the week became a national event from 1988. RCOA took on responsibility for the national coordination of Refugee Week from 2004.
According to the UNHCR, the United Nation’s Refugee Agency, there are now 89.3 million forcibly displaced people, as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order in their countries of origin. (A year ago, the figure was 82.4 million forcibly displaced people.)
35 million of these people are children, aged under 18 years. 1 million of these children were born as refugees; in the years 2018 to 2020, an average of between 290,000 and 340,000 children were born into a refugee life per year.
Over half of these people (53.2 million) are classified as “internally displaced”, meaning that they are homeless within their own country. 27.1 million are officially classified as refugees, meaning that they are “unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” This is the definition in the Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees—an international agreement which Australia signed in 1951, the year it was published.
the significant rise, globally, of displaced people,
refugees, and asylum seekers in the past decade.
A further 4.6 million people are classified as asylum seekers. Under Article 14 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, everyone has the right to seek asylum The 1951 Refugee Convention prohibits states from imposing penalties on those entering ‘illegally’ who come directly from a territory where their life or freedom is threatened. (Terms such as ‘illegals’, ‘queue jumpers’ and ‘boat people’ are both inaccurate and unhelpful—even though they appear in the media with saddening regularity, they are terms that should be avoided.)
See https://www.unhcr.org/en-au/1951-refugee-convention.html
More than two thirds of all refugees currently under the UNHCR’s mandate come from just five countries: the Syrian Arabic Republic (6.7 million), Venezuela (4.0 million), Afghanistan (2.6 million), South Sudan (2.2 million), and Myanmar (1.1 million).
The countries which are currently hosting the most number of refugees are Turkey (3.6 million), Pakistan (1.4 million), Uganda (1.4 million), Germany (1.1 million), Sudan (just over 1 million), and the Islamic Republic of Iran (just under 1 million). Developing countries host 86 per cent of the world’s refugees, and the Least Developed Countries provide asylum to 27 per cent of the total.
In the last full year (2020–2021), Australia’s Refugee and Humanitarian Program was set at 13,750 places. We willingly accept this amount of incoming refugees, and recognise the value that such people do bring to the Australian society. we have fallen victim to the fear pedalled by unscrupulous elements in society, and in government, over the past decade, about the “hordes” of people seeking the safety of refuge in ur country.
In Australia, the most enduring myth about people seeking asylum is that most arrive by boat. They don’t. The clear fact is that most people seeking asylum arrive by air. It’s time for us to throw overboard the fear of people who come here seeking refuge and asylum on boats, and recognise that the fear fuelled by right-wing agitators over the past decade has not served us well at all.
Adhering to the provisions of the Refugee Convention, as a,country, would be an excellent step,for us to take this year. That would be a significant step towards Healing in our national life.
See stories and additional statistics at https://www.refugeeweek.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/RCOA-Refugee-Myths-and-Facts-2022-WEB.pdf
An Informed Faith 