Iraq News Now

Overview

In the first nine months of 2019, just over 27,200 refugees were submitted by UNHCR for resettlement to 20 countries in Europe. This is 84% of the total submissions in 2018, and already more than double the average rate of 17,800 submissions per year during the previous 10 years. Three countries that received smaller numbers of resettlement submissions in 2018 have not yet received submissions during 2019. Europe’s proportion of resettlement submissions globally in 2019 is 42%. Between 2009 and 2016, this proportion increased from 10% to 18%, before substantially increasing to 52% during 2017 and 40% during 2018. The increase in 2017 is primarily due to a significant decrease globally in the scale of some States’ resettlement programmes, most notably by the United States of America, in parallel to an increase of resettlement places made available by European States.