A five-year downward trend in asylum applications in industrialized countries reversed in 2007, largely due to an increase in the number of Iraqi asylum seekers, the UN refugee agency said Tuesday.
Some 338,000 new applications for refugee status were submitted last year in 43 industrialized countries, a 10-percent rise compared with 2006, which saw the fewest number of applications in20 years, said the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in a statement.
"The overall downward trend in asylum applications was offset last year by a large increase in the number of asylum seekers from Iraq," the Geneva-based agency said.
According to the agency, Iraqis topped the list of asylum seekers in the world's industrialized countries for the second year running. The number of Iraqis applying for asylum almost doubled in one year, from 22,900 in 2006 to 45,200 last year.
However, the number represents only 1 percent of the estimated 4.5 million Iraqis uprooted by the domestic conflict, the UNHCR added.
Those include more than 2.5 million people displaced within Iraq and another 2 million in neighboring countries such as Syria and Jordan.
The United States was the main destination for asylum seekers of all nationalities in 2007, with an estimated 49,200 new asylum claims, accounting for 15 percent of all applications in industrialized countries.
After the United States, other main destination countries for asylum seekers in 2007 were Sweden, France, Canada and Britain. Greece, Germany, Italy, Austria and Belgium were also among the top 10 receptor countries.
Source: Xinhua
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