US restrictions on asylum-seekers may violate international law: UNHCR
The head of the UN refugee agency says he understands that the Biden administration enacted new restrictions on asylum-seekers entering the United States, but cautioned that some aspects of the executive order may violate refugee protection required in international law.
Filippo Grandi, the UN high commissioner for refugees, spoke to The Associated Press as his agency issued its annual Global Trends report for 2023 on Thursday. It found that the cumulative number of people who have been subjected to forced displacement rose to 120 million people in 2023 6 million more than in the year before.
The refugee agency noted that the total count was roughly equivalent to the entire population of Japan.
The UNHCR report found that three-fourths of those people forcibly displaced including both refugees driven abroad and people displaced inside their own countries lived in poor or middle-income countries. Grandi insisted that was a sign of how migrant and refugee flows were not just an iss