“Internal displacement must be brought back on to the global agenda”, urges NRC’s Secretary General Jan Egeland ahead of the NRC Global Displacement Conference 2017. “Humanity has no borders, and no group should be neglected.”
“We need the full picture of global displacement to be acknowledged. Two-thirds of all people currently displaced by conflict around the world are internally displaced. To limit access to assistance and protection according to lines on a map would be a failure of humanity,” says Egeland.
Lack of attention and investment
The NRC Displacement Conference 2017"Behind borders and walls: ensuring internally displaced people are not left behind" takes place in Oslo on Monday 24 April.
The conference aims to push internal displacement up on the global policy agenda and to seek better solutions to the needs of people displaced within their own country.
The lack of global attention for and investment in internally displaced people are the two main topics that will be addressed and discussed at the conference.
IDPs off the agenda
In 2016 global policy commitments to internally displaced people lost momentum. That happened in stark disconnection from the reality and scale of internal displacement.
40.8 million people were displaced within their own country at the end of 2015 as a result of conflict. This is not a new development: since 1990, the number of people internally displaced by conflict measured at the end of each year has been nearly twice the number of refugees.
Today, Colombia and Syria are the countries with the highest number of people living in displacement, both seeing more than six million people displaced within their own borders. Iraq and Sudan follow with over three million internally displaced people. The figures are also high in Yemen, Nigeria, South Sudan, Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Pakistan.