UNHCR Press Conference: Annual Global Trends Report

Thank you for joining us today.

UNHCRUN refugee agencies embargoed press briefing at the Palais de Nacion.

My name is Eugene Bian.

[Other language spoken]

As many of you already know that ahead of the World Refugee Day on 20th of June, UNHCR launches our On your Global Trends report, our flagship report on A4 set displacement globally.

This is a report that we have a traditionally launched with the Palais press corps under embargo and we greatly value our partnership with Akano Association, the Correspondo Accrediti operate, the National Juni.

On that note, we are very pleased to have our United Nations High Commissioner for Refugee, Ibaram Salih.

He took up his role, as you know, as the 12th High Commissioner for Refugee earlier this year and made it a priority to begin in the field meeting displaced people and the community hosting them and also listening directly to their experiences.

High Commissioner, welcome.

We're very happy to have you here with the Polypress Corps.

He joined by Tareq Bouchibaki, UNATCRS Chief Statistician, who is behind the data and analysis of the report and will be also available for all your technical questions.

A brief reminder before we start High Commissioner's remarks that today's briefing and all the material you have received are under strict embargo until 05/01 AM Central European Summertime on 11th of June.

You should have also received all the embargoed material already last night.

If you haven't, please let one of my colleague to know.

After the briefing in terms of a format, we'll begin with the remarks from High Commissioner, then we will open the floor for question.

We know there is considerable interest in hearing from the High Commissioner, but please remind you today's briefing is dedicated to the Global Trends report.

So I would kindly ask a colleague to keep question focused on the report's finding.

Hi Commissioner, thank you so much for joining us today.

You have the floor.

Thank you so very much.

[Other language spoken]

Thank you so very much.

Good morning and thank you for joining us today.

Your reporting is absolutely crucial to bring in home the realities experienced by displaced people around the world.

And at a time when misinformation spreads rapidly and public debate is often polarised, independent and accurate reporting is absolutely important.

And thank you for covering the plight of displaced communities and reporting not on the on emergencies, but also on the stories on solutions, resilience and inclusion.

These stories help shape public understanding and inform policy, and they make a real difference to the lives of millions of people forced to flee.

On Thursday, UNCR will release its latest global Trends report.

Let me walk you through the key findings.

The overall picture.

41.6 million people were refugees at the end of 2025.

That figure includes 35.6 million refugees and the UNCR mandate and 6,000,000 Palestinian refugees and the Onrwa's mandate.

It is 1.2 million fewer than the previous year, and that modest decline is welcome news.

There are also 68.7 million internally displaced people, people who have fled their homes but have not crossed international borders and therefore do not benefit from the international protection system in the conventional sense.

Nearly half of the ID PS 46% come from just five countries, Sudan, Colombia, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan.

And there are 4.5 million stateless people, though the true figure is almost certainly much higher since many stateless populations are unregistered and invisible to official statistics.

7 in 10 stateless people live in just four countries, Bangladesh, Cote d'Ivoire, Thailand and Myanmar.

The Rohingyas remain the world's largest stateless group.

1.8 million people, 1.2 million of whom are living as refugees in Bangladesh.

Who are the refugees and where are they?

36 of the world's refugee are hosted by just six countries, Colombia, Germany, Turkia, Uganda, Iran and Chad.

Nearly 2/3 live in countries neighbouring their own.

More than 1/4 are hosted in the world's lowest least developed countries.

39% of refugees are children, a proportion far exceeding their share of the world's population as a whole, coming to new displacement in 2025.

Despite the overall decline, displacement pressures remain acute.

Nearly 5.4 million people were newly forced to flee across international borders during 2025.

The major crisis driving the new displacements included Sudan, now produce one of the largest displacement situations in the world, as well as ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, Myanmar and parts of the Sahel.

New crisis continue to emerge, while unfortunately existing ones remain unresolved on the returns and the importance of noting the important distinctions.

One of the most significant developments in 2025 was an increase in returns.

Nearly 4.4 million refugees returned to their countries of origin and more than 10 million internally displaced people returned to their areas of origin.

Together, this represents one of the largest return movements recorded in recent history.

However, we must be precise about what those numbers really represent.

The great majority of the refugee returns, more than 90%, were concentrated in just three countries, Afghanistan 1.9 million, Syria 1.3 million and Sudan 651,000 and 500 people.

And many of these returns occurred not under conditions of safety and stability, but under pressure to countries where insecurity persist, where infrastructure has been damaged, and where basic services and economic opportunities remain scarce.

Voluntary returns to post conflict Syria and returns under pressure to Afghanistan are not the same thing.

We must be honest about that distinctions, because conflating them risks undermining the very principle of voluntary, safe and dignified return that lies at the heart of durable solutions.

Returns that are not safe and countries to voluntary are not solutions.

They risk becoming the beginning of a new displacement cycle.

Furthermore, I have to note that resettlement, which is one of the most critical protection tools available for refugees who cannot safely return and cannot integrate locally, has been in decline.

In 2025, fewer than 82,000 refugees were resettled, down from more than 188,000 in 2024 and a fraction of those in need of this pathway.

The decline in resettlement is deeply concerning and I shall return to this later on.

Beyond the headlines figures, the Global Trend report highlights a challenge that rarely receives the attention it deserves.

Displacement is becoming increasingly prolonged.

Today, 70% of refugees are living in protracted situations, defined as situations where refugees had been in exile for five years and more without immediate prospects of a durable solution.

That is nearly 25 million people.

They include families who have spent not years but sometimes decades in exile, children who have grown up knowing no other life.

Let me be clear about what a protracted situation actually looks like for the people living it.

It means living in a refugee camp or an informal settlement, often in a country that itself is faced with huge economic pressures, without the right to work, to move freely or to access national education and healthcare systems.

It means dependency on humanitarian assistance, not as a temporary bridge but as a permanent way of life.

It means young people with no pathway to higher education or employment.

It means gradual erosion of dignity, agency and hope.

It is important to distinguish a refugee who has been in a stable rights protecting country for many years, with access to labour markets, education and healthcare, and that is in every position so different from others, in countries that have spent five years in camps in a least developed country, with no legal status and no services and no right to work.

When we speak of protected displacement as a crisis, it is above all the latter we're talking about.

The most urgent target group is roughly 9 million refugees in need living in the world's poorest countries, the least developed countries, who have been displaced for years without access to services, livelihoods and legal certainty.

These are the people whom protracted displacement is not an administrative category, but a daily reality of deprivation and indignity.

Humanitarian assistance has saved lives and remain indispensable in emergencies.

But it was designed for emergencies.

It was never intended to sustain generations of people indefinitely.

It cannot deliver the jobs, education, investment and stability that enable people to build their lives.

We cannot remain trapped in that model designed for short term emergencies when most displacement today is painfully protracted.

The findings in this report reinforce Y solutions must become a greater priority for the international community.

UNSCR strategic ambition of the next decade is to help reduce by half the number of refugees in protracted displacement who remain dependent on humanitarian assistance.

We call this 50 by 35.

This is not a call to reduce support for refugees.

It is a call to ensure that fewer people need to be dependent on humanitarian assistance for years or decades because they have meaningful opportunities to rebuild their lives.

It is about expanding opportunity, restoring agency and helping more refugees regain control over their futures.

A key ban, a key benchmark of success, will be helping more refugees and enough to reach at least the national poverty lines in the countries hosting them.

Achieving this requires a clear understanding of what 3 actors must do.

For this agenda to succeed, host countries must open national systems to refugees.

Their education system, their healthcare systems and their labour markets, the financial services.

We know this works.

Countries that have granted refugees the right to work and more freely have seen refugees contribute to local economies, pay taxes, reduce their own dependency on aid.

Inclusion is not a burden on host communities, it is a benefit to them.

We recognise that many host countries face significant economic pressures of their own.

The countries hosting the most refugees are not for most part, rich countries are able to deal with some of these challenges.

The countries like Uganda, Chad, Iran have had demonstrated remarkable solidarity while carrying responsibility that the international community has not adequately showed.

The international community must provide sustained, predictable financial support to host countries, not only for humanitarian response, but for development, investment, infrastructure, education systems, healthcare capacity and economic opportunity.

Supporting refugees and supporting host communities are not competing priorities.

They are mutually reinforcing.

Development actors, including the World Bank, the UNDP, other development banks must be full partners in this agenda.

Investment in the communities hosting the world's refugees must be proportionate to the scale of this challenge.

UNCR will play a catalytic role, advocating for greater inclusion, brokering partnerships between host governments, development institutions and the private sector, and focusing our own resources on expanding livelihoods, education and pathways to self-reliance.

Voluntary return when conditions genuinely permit, remains the preferred and most sustainable solution.

We will continue to invest in peace building and recovery efforts that make safe, dignified and durable returns possible, including livelihood support, so that retainees can rebuild their lives rather than being displaced again.

This year, COLLEAGUES marks the 75th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention.

For 3/4 of a century, this Convention has provided the foundation for international refugee protection and has helped save millions of lives.

This Convention has genuinely delivered for humanity over the past 75 years.

Its principles remain as relevant today as when it was adopted.

But anniversaries are not occasions just for commemorations.

They are also occasions and opportunities for commitments.

As we mark the 7050 years of the Convention, UNSCR calls on States to reaffirm a number of fundamental priorities.

First, the principle of non refarmament, the prohibition on returning a person to a country where they face a real risk of persecution or serious harm, is the heart of the Convention.

It is non negotiable.

At a time when political pressure to restrict asylum is growing in many countries, we call on all states to uphold this principle without exception.

There is no protection system worthy of the name without non refinement.

Second, we definitely need to improve on asylum system.

The right to seek asylum is meaningless without a fair, efficient and accessible system to determining who qualifies for protection many asylum systems today are under severe strain, overwhelmed by blockage, subject to political pressures, and failing to provide timely inferred decisions that both refugees and public confidence require.

It's important to maintain the integrity of the asylum system from abuse asylum system is meant for people who need protection in accordance of the definitions of the.

1951 Convention UNSCR calls on states to invest in strengthening their asylum systems and to ensure that people who need protection have access to a fur hearing.

Once again, the integrity of this system needs to be preserved, preserved for the people who need it and also preserved from abuse.

In 2025, fewer than 82,000 refugees were resettled globally, despite 1,000,000 remaining in need of this vital pathway.

That figure must increase.

Resettlement is not a charity, it's a protection tool, a responsibility sharing mechanism and expression of international solidarity with the countries hosting the overwhelming majority of the world's refugees.

Expanding solutions also requires greater responsibility sharing.

Countries hosting the overwhelming majority of the world's refugees cannot be left to shoulder this responsibility alone.

International solidarity remains essential to sustaining protection and creating opportunities for refugees to rebuild their lives.

Alongside resettlement, we call for expansion for other safe and legal pathways, for family reunification, education, scholarships, labour mobility programmes.

Every dangerous sea crossing and every death in the desert represent the failure of the international community to provide safe and legal alternatives to people who have no other option.

The human cost of the failure is measured not in statistics, but in lives.

The choices we make today will determine whether millions of people remain trapped in cycles of displacement and dependency, or whether they have the opportunity to rebuild their lives with dignity, purpose and hope.

[Other language spoken]

And international solidarity, the willingness of the global community to share responsibility for the world's most vulnerable people, matters more than ever.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you very much.

Hi Commissioner, You have a set up clearly why this year's Global Trends Met report matters not only as a picture of a focus displacement today, but as a guide for where action is needed, where responsibility must be shared and where solution must be accelerated.

We'll now open the floor for question.

Please identify yourself and your outlet and indicate where, whether, where, whether your question is for High Commissioner or for Tarek or for both.

[Other language spoken]

Thank you, Your Excellency for this briefing and for giving us the opportunity to ask questions.

My question is about Lebanon, the situation of the displacement.

We know that more than a million are displaced now, and with more than 1,000,000 1/2 refugees, Syrians and Palestinians, how is the situation?

Another question is about a totally forgotten crisis in Yemen.

What is the situation in Yemen?

[Other language spoken]

Of course, Lebanon is an extremely painful tragedy in every sense of the word.

I was in Lebanon about a month and a half ago, and I witnessed for myself the scale of the displacement.

Nearly 150 of that population have already been displaced and at it.

This is truly unacceptable, and we must make sure this does not become a new normal.

That's why it's so important for the peace to take root in Lebanon and to really end the cycle of violence so that people can go back to their communities.

And it's also very painful because few months ago we were all very hopeful about Lebanon, that it was about to take off economically and there were a lot of positive prospects for Lebanon.

UNSCR is there in Lebanon.

Our colleagues are really delivering, are trying to be with the people who need help in collaboration with the government of Lebanon and the NGOs.

And it's imperative that we do support the government of Lebanon in this hour of need and to manage and help deal with this enormous challenge.

Of course, Yemen remains an ongoing crisis, and it has caused significant internal displacement as well as displacement beyond the international borders.

We very much hope that the situation in Yemen is put to rest.

Before long, we would have a durable political solutions in which this this dynamic of conflict is really ended.

At the end of the day, wherever you look, the primary cause of displacement these days is conflict, and peace is the solution and the focus, while we have to deliver for the people in need, as we do now.

And I'm very proud of what UNSCR has been doing, certainly in the case of Lebanon, for that matter, Yemen and other situations.

But really the focus has to be on peace and to help in Lebanon recover and have a durable peace that allows people to go back to their communities.

Christian from DPA, thank you.

[Other language spoken]

I would like to 0 in on 2 aspects that you mentioned.

The first one is 50 by 35.

Isn't the biggest part of the solution to achieve that to end conflicts and and establish peace, which is nothing that UNHCR can do anything about?

That's my first question.

The second question is saving the asylum system from abuse.

That seems that would resonate with a lot of the rich countries, governments and especially people.

People are get the impression that the asylum system is being abused by migrants who are looking for work opportunities.

What do you suggest?

How can you make the asylum system safe from abuse?

Because you mentioned abuse particularly.

[Other language spoken]

70% of the refugee population in the world, and I say refugees, these are people of cross international borders and according to the definition of 1951 convention, live in situations where they have been refugees for five years and more, in some cases a decade, 2 decades, in the case of Rohingyas, even more.

Many of these refugees are also dependent on humanitarian assistance year after year.

This is an unacceptable situation.

I consider this to be truly a fundamental violation of human rights to dignity.

Of course, peace is the ultimate solution, as we have seen in Syria with the change of the Assad regime last year, we had nearly 1.3 million Syrians going back to Syria.

This year, 2026, even though part of this is to do with the war in Lebanon, nearly half a million extra people have gone back from Lebanon to Syria.

I do not necessarily call that entirely voluntary returns, but the situation of peace stability in Syria represents a huge opportunity to having a large numbers of these refugees, certainly in the neighbouring countries, to go back home.

Of course, that is definitely the case.

I would say also in the case of Ukraine, if there is peace, and based on surveys that we do, many of the Ukrainians, certainly the neighbouring countries, would very much like to go back to the country and be part of the rebuilding of the country.

And the government in Ukraine is also looking at possibilities and potential for this with peace coming in there.

Venezuela is another case in point.

With the changes that have happened, if there is stability, if there is inclusion, if there is political accommodations that will make people feel safe and, and it is, we see a chance of a lot of people going back home.

This is a solution.

But short of that, in many countries where you have these large numbers of refugees who are basically, as I said, stuck in camps for years on end and dependent mostly on humanitarian assistance, these countries are also looking at ways of eliminate our ending the status because it's a huge burden on their economies.

They are unable to tap into it.

And these communities, these camps are growing in size year after year, causing all kind of issues.

How about, for example, we see in Kenya the Shurika plan, which is basically offering refugees A pathway for inclusion into the job market, access to legal services, healthcare, etcetera and so on.

But Kenya needs help with development assistance with building infrastructure, schools and healthcare system, not just for the refugees but also for the host community to enable refugee inclusion in a much faster way.

The same for Chad, the same for Uganda, the same for many of these other countries.

I believe and and UNSCR has, is committed to this.

This is the way.

While we need to provide protection, while we need to provide humanitarian assistance, and that is absolutely important in emergency situations, you simply cannot leave people who need water, who need food, who need medicine.

[Other language spoken]

This is a moral legal responsibility that we have.

But we really need also to find a pathway for self-reliance because you cannot do this year after year.

And as I said, it is beyond being a burden, beyond being a problem for the host nations, for the refugees themselves, but it is also genuinely a violation of a fundamental human rights to dignity.

And this is what we are talking about.

We are already talking to the World Bank.

We were talking to UNDP and other development agencies, talking to governments less, while we need to do these core, our response, deliver on these core responsibilities of protection and humanitarian assistance, but also let us find a pathway for inclusion and hopefully peace will come and many of these refugees go back home.

By the way, in my travels to many of these refugee communities, whether in Chad, Kenya, Jordan, Lebanon, Ukraine, each is a unique situation, but all share, I would say 2 characteristics.

[Other language spoken]

Most refugees want to go home.

Whomever you talk to, most refugees want to go home.

Depicting refugees as somehow are those people who are jumping in terms of becoming migrants or moving to another country is not entirely true.

People with peace would rather go back home and the other is well, I have to say, regardless of the uniqueness of those situations each year, that women and girls are often the ones who bear the brunt of the brutality of displacement and and violence and conflict.

On the issue of the integrity of the international protection system, the international protection system is meant for refugees, is meant for people who are fleeing persecution or fleeing conflict, who have a well founded fear of persecution for a number of reasons, violations of human rights, conflicts etcetera and so on is well defined.

Migration is part of human history.

Humans have moved from one region 1 community to another.

Countries have a sovereign right to immigration laws and and controls which we believe should be humane, should be observant of basic human rights, should be consistent with international standards, should be fair and legal.

But to basically lump your migration challenges or issues into the protection system of refugees, it it, it causes problems for refugees, which is meant to be to be offered protections and it does not provide a solution to that issue.

So this is a challenge that we should be speaking about in a fairway.

This is at the end of the day, we are all talking from our shared humanity and our legal responsibilities and people deserve third treatment, legal, lawful treatment based on international law, based on respect of human rights.

Hello TIOS, Swiss news agency.

[Other language spoken]

I, Commissioner, for the press conference.

So when you look at these figures and the way the different situations might have evolved throughout the year, what is currently the refugee crisis who worries you the most in itself?

And maybe what is the refugee crisis who worries you the most because of the effects of the current blockade in the almost Strait?

We know that this has major consequences on the different situations for for refugees.

And maybe a short question for Mr Shabaki, if I read correctly.

So 5.4, almost 5.4 million people fled last year and almost 4.4 came back.

So how do you explain the 1.2 fewer million fewer refugees in the total?

The blockade on Hormuz has obviously impacted supply change and certainly impacted humanitarian efforts in a very big way.

It has meant rising prices, rising costs for our transportation, for our access to date to to emergency supplies and you name it.

Furthermore, for us, UAE has been a major humanitarian hub, not just for UNSCR, for many humanitarian organisations.

And that they provided this Dubai humanitarian hub city, essentially offering facilities to all UN agencies and from which we would fly emergency support or humanitarian supplies to Africa, to Asia.

And it was quite, quite important.

The attacks on the Gulf, the tax on UAE has, has really disrupted a lot of those things.

And that's why we hope this conflict is going to end soon, The sooner the better because really the impact is really on the whole of the world globally and so on.

And then and in terms of even displacement, as we have seen in Lebanon in 2026, the, the, the, the increase in, in displacement certainly more than 1,000,000 internally displaced people is quite a large number.

This conflict in some ways we consider to have been also A cause for pushing people, Afghani refugees or displaced people from Iran and some in Pakistan as well, who have been really pushed back into into Afghanistan.

And we believe not entirely voluntarily, rather under adverse conditions and under some pressures that I'm not happy with and we worry about.

And the issue of the figures, the decline comes not only from the returns, but also from a number of refugees who have been declassified or reclassified as refugees to a variety of other means of naturalisation, movement onward, etcetera and so on.

And Tarek, you may want to comment on that too as well, to be more specific.

Thank you very much, High Commissioner, and thank you for your question.

Indeed, as the High Commissioner has stated, more than 4.4 million refugees have returned back, but the life cycle of a refugee includes departures on settlement, for example, refugees who become citizens of their country, which then eventually leads to, technically speaking, statistics and minus figure, right, because people fall off the books because they obtain the citizenship of that country, which is the end goal in a way, if you are in a particular hosting country.

We also have declassification of numbers that happens quite regularly as governments report to us those refugee statistics on a regular basis.

So they review their own figures on a regular basis, which leads and 2025 has been rather than exceptionally in this regard.

How many countries have reclassified their numbers, which led eventually to a decrease and that's decrease of 1.2 million refugees to by the end of 2025.

[Other language spoken]

Yes, Alexandrobuy, AFP, thank you so much for this briefing back to asylum system.

If it's possible, we'd like to know if you had discussions with the US administration regarding the fact that they have a specific deportation system, they have new dispositives like sending people back to unsafe homelands and maybe sometime third countries.

We'd like to know if you had concerns about that.

And do you have raised the issue with the US administration UNSCR?

Has always acknowledged the sovereign right of countries to manage borders while upholding their commitments to refugee protection.

UNSC Rs position on this asylum system is well known.

Asylum seekers must have access to Fur and efficient procedures to determine the claim.

Individuals fleeing conflict, persecution and violence need effective Ave for seeking safety and in addition, people need international protection, must not be returned to a place where they face the risk of harm.

On these deportations that you mentioned is a We are aware, of course, of these reports.

UNSCR, however, has not seen any formal proposal or agreement from the US for the transfer or removal of third country nationals to any countries in the West or Central African region and has not been involved in those deliberations and discussions.

Therefore, we cannot at this stage comment on any specifics of such agreements or proposals that the US might have had with these governments.

UNSCR will continue to support states in West Central Africa to strengthen their asylum systems by advising on development of sound legal and policy frameworks in line with international standards.

John Halpern, the Red News Thank you.

Hi Commissioner for the briefing.

[Other language spoken]

1, is this issue of small or under resourced countries taking on a disproportionate share of responsibility like Lebanon has been, you know, an issue for years?

And I'm wondering number one, what the report says about that is, is there anything in the report that shows the situation is improving or deteriorating?

Second question is on the registration process that's at the heart of the operations.

Is there any indication in the report that cuts in the agency has affected the registration process or that biometrics or apps or new technologies are able to compensate to some degree?

[Other language spoken]

On these countries that are hosting refugees, and I want to be really as clear as I can be, is mostly the least developed countries that are having the responsibility of accommodating these large numbers of refugees.

And there is some humanitarian assistance, some support, undoubtedly so, for which we still have to be absolutely appreciative.

But to say that this is anywhere near to deal with the challenges they face, absolutely not.

And I will add to it as well for the world to think that these are far away places and we could be immune from the consequences of what happens in the Sahel or sub-Saharan Africa or some of these other nations that are hosting these largest large numbers of refugees.

Just look at what is happening in Libya in terms of movements onward and all these human traffickers that are really making life difficult, not to mention potential radicalisation and security concerns that should concern us all.

I'm saying this because it is our shared humanity that we need to be there to help.

It's our legal responsibility that we need to be there to help burden sharing, but also it is a national interest to really be there.

What we are advocating is that instead of just maintaining A humanitarian assistance system year after year to deal with this problem, let's look at pathways for inclusion and sustainable responses and solutions that allows people to move out of the dependency cycle.

This is good for the host communities, this is good for the refugees and I believe is good for the world as a whole.

Instead of leaving these people in these camps and thinking that they you, that they are out of our view and therefore of no concern is the wrong attitude.

And therefore, of course, we need to invest in peace and making sure that peace is, is absolute priority because that is, even though this is not the UNSC Rs mandate.

But at the same time, we should be speaking directly to the peace actors, to the global actors around the world.

Had Syria been contained, resolved by 2011, 2012, we probably would not have had millions of Syrians leave.

Had Sudan been attended to early on when we had the civilian government in Sudan and a coup pushes out and then war breaks out between these factions, terrorising an entire population and thinking we can be immune from all of this is a failure of the peace dynamics that is allowing these things to happen, that peace must be really a priority.

We should focus on it.

It's you call it humanitarian diplomacy, you call it call for peace, whatever the term is, but that is the real ultimate solutions.

But in the meantime as well, when you go to a Chad and you see a country struggling on its own, but still having to host so many refugees and to be fair, hosting them so generously, offering them pathways for inclusions.

But it cannot do it given the scale of economic challenges that they have.

How about really creating these development mechanisms shortly in existence, by the way, but expanding it, scaling it focus in a focused way with refugee inclusion to be part of the system.

It will be helpful to their own domestic economy.

It will be helpful to the refugees and it will help us man help the situation.

By the way, on this matter is absolutely important to to reflect on the following.

A refugee is meant to be a temporary situation, is not meant to be a permanent fate.

I can speak to this from personal experience.

I was a refugee myself.

Protection was vital but also opportunities for inclusion, for education.

self-reliance was also absolutely important.

This present dynamics that we are witnessing where we have people in these situations year after year and dependent on humanitarian assistance is not only not sustainable financially and economically, but it is also inhumane and I think politically dangerous too as well.

We should be looking and as you see in this global trend report, we are focusing on solutions a lot.

It's not just a matter of throwing numbers at you and saying, oh, things are bad, give us more resources in order to deal with with this growing problem.

There are opportunity.

Syria is an opportunity.

We need to focus on that.

Some of these countries in Africa really are offering pathways for inclusion.

We should really be engaged and we should be there in order to focus on this and demonstrate.

So reducing the number of long term displacement by 50% in 10 years, it's an, an ambitious goal, may be far too ambitious, but let's hold ourselves to that outcome and really work on it because this is this is something that we can point to.

This can change the narrative about refugees as well, that refugees are just a wave of people are trying to invade our borders and so on.

Now there are other ways of that can tell the story in terms of registration process.

Of course, technology, if I understood your questions correctly, is unbelievable already.

The UNSCR has a huge investment in registration technology, whether it is the through the Iris System Pro, it's called progress that we have basically each refugee has a digital ID and it is being used in terms of our processes management and and tracking and so on.

But yesterday I was given a briefing on our management review, including that on technology about what we can do and not do with this data technology that is emerging.

It's unbelievable what can be done.

And we've now looking at in a very serious way of leveraging this technology to help us do our management in better ways, more streamlined, more effective, more efficient way, but also enabling refugees in terms of communication, in terms of tracking, in terms of accounting for in in, in a better way.

We're not there yet, but we're very much actively looking at leveraging that technology.

Of course, with due regard to data protection and the rights of refugees that we do not want their data to be compromised or to be abused in any shape or form.

We have a time for one last question.

I see Michelle has a waiting patiently.

Michelle Langhorne, the Geneva Solution.

[Other language spoken]

Thank you for taking my question.

[Other language spoken]

Commissioner, I was wondering, given the sharp reduction in donor support that we've seen in the last year and of course that is continuing, how well is the UNHCR positioned to respond to the global refugee crisis?

That remains really significant given the numbers that you just shared with us.

Are there specific programmes or operations that you are no no longer able to carry out as a result of where do you see the the critical depths?

[Other language spoken]

I have to say UNSCR is undoubtedly challenged with a lack of resources and the budget cuts that the organisation has experienced over the past couple of years have been quite, quite drastic to say the least.

And prioritising in this environment is very difficult because you are talking about people who are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance, whether it is water, food, shelter, some of these basic requirements that and I've seen witness some of these in Chad, refugees crossing the borders from Sudan, really traumatised by the conflict, traumatised along the way.

And in a place like Ibisha, we are, we were only at the time when I was there able to provide 9 litres of water per day per person, far below the emergency need.

This should not be the state of the world we live in today.

But the reality is that our resources have shrunk in a very, very serious way.

So we will continue to work in terms of ensuring that we will have adequate funding for some of these critical needs.

But also, as I have explained, our focus will be on a pathway to solutions as well, not just maintaining the humanitarian assistance which remains important in so many ways.

But we should tell Member states, stakeholders, host nations, that while we do this, there is a pathway to having a more sustainable situations.

As I said, we are working closely with the World Bank, with UNDP and other development agencies in order to ensure that this programme will be practical, operational and with tangible outcomes and timelines that will be we can report back on.

On that note, thank you everyone for joining us here today and for your question.

My thanks to the High Commissioner and for Tarek here for briefing on us on this year's the Global Trends report, the report and related material available through our dedicated UNHCR web page.

I hope you all received it.

If you have any follow up question, some of us will stay behind, so please follow up with us directly.

Thank you very much.

[Other language spoken]