UN refugees chief: West should open borders as crises multiply

Crises around the world have forced record numbers of people to flee their countries and Western countries should help the developing world deal with the influx by accepting more refugees, the United Nations said in a report on Monday, DPa reported.

Last year, conflicts in Africa, the Middle East and other regions forced 800,000 people to leave their countries, the highest number since 2000, the office of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Antonio Guterres said.

Including people who were displaced in their own countries, that number rose to 4.3 million. Conflict in Syria, Sudan and Mali did not make this year look better, Guterres told reporters ahead of the report's release.

He noted that the international emergency system only worked because all developing countries located next to crisis spots shouldered their responsibility and kept their borders open.

"It is very important to underline that fact in a world where sometimes countries that are further away from crisis situations try to close their borders when people come to them in need of protection," he told reporters.

European states this month to reintroduce the possibility of emergency border controls in the border-free Schengen in response to a flow of refugees to southern European countries from North Africa after the Arab Spring uprisings.

Guterres said industrialized countries should not only give economic aid to poorer countries that host a lot of migrants, but that they should also take in more long-term refugees.

Some 80,000 refugees were resettled in third countries in 2011, but there was a need for countries to accept ten times more, according to the UNHCR. The United States, Canada and Australia took in 91 per cent of last year's resettlers.

Looking at 2012, Guterres said that the global economic situation, and the combination of continuing refugee flows from countries like Afghanistan and crises like in Syria did not bode well.

"All the projections we can make now are in the sense that we will have less funding in 2012 than in 2011, with higher requests for action," he said.