Children number 51 per cent of the world’s refugees
The Catholic Register
TORONTO (CCN)
It’s only a number, but 65.3 million for Martin Mark is heart-breaking.
Last year a new record for refugees worldwide was set, with 21.3 million official refugees, 40.8 million people driven from their homes but not yet across an international border, and 3.2 million claiming asylum in the industrialized West.
It adds up to 24 people displaced by war, famine, persecution, or violence each and every minute of 2015. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees calculates that one of every 113 people on earth is either an asylum seeker, internally displaced, or a refugee. Children are 51 per cent of the world’s refugees.
As the director of the Office for Refugees, Archdiocese of Toronto, Mark finds these numbers shocking and dispiriting.
“Maybe I’m a dreamer,” he told The Catholic Register. “I had the impression we had reached the peak (in 2014), that it could not get worse, but I was wrong.”
Last year the Office for Refugees began the process for sponsoring about 2,300 refugees, more than doubling the 1,500 cases the office already had on file on behalf of parishes, religious communities, and other volunteer sponsorship groups. The office has recently more than doubled its small staff of six.
Since Nov. 4, 28,640 Syrian refugees have been resettled in Canada. This year Canada will resettle more than 44,000 refugees, most of them Syrians.
But Canada’s resettlement numbers and the efforts of hundreds of parish-based volunteer committees working with the Office for Refugees pale in comparison to the scale of the problem globally, Mark said.
“If you see the two forces: one is helping displaced people to find durable solutions, it’s much smaller than the force creating wars and instability all around the world,” he said.
“We who visit the camps, we who know the reality, we have to speak up. We have to be advocates. We cannot be silent anymore. We cannot be just refugee workers.”
