UNHCR in the context of "Akkar"

Kigali (Kinyarwanda pronunciation: [ki.ɡɑ́.ɾi]), officially the City of Kigali also known as Kigali City (abbreviated as KGL or CoK), is the capital, largest city, and a province-level administrative unit of Rwanda. It is located near the country's geographic centre, in a landscape of rolling hills marked by valleys and ridges connected by steep slopes. A Rwanda's primate city, Kigali is a relatively young urban centre. Founded in 1907 as a German administrative outpost, it served as a minor administrative centre until it became the national capital at independence in 1962, shifting the main administrative focus away from Huye (formerly Astrida).

As of 31 August 2022, Kigali city has a population of 1,745,555 inhabitants, roughly seven times that of the nation's second most populous city, Gisenyi. Kigali's UNHCR coordinate operations for nearly 135,000 refugees and has a special facility in Gashora, to temporarily host refugees who are being resettled from crisis zones, mainly Libya, Yemen or other conflict areas, and provided with medical care, basic services and legal processing. After preparation, they are resettled to countries like the United States or Canada. Also notable, before cancellation in July 2024, the Rwanda asylum plan or "Rwanda Plan" was an agreement to accept deported migrants from the United Kingdom.

Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part. The term was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin. It is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) of 1948 as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group's conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

The preamble to the CPPCG states that "genocide is a crime under international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United Nations and condemned by the civilized world", and it also states that "at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity." Genocide is widely considered to be the epitome of human evil, and has been referred to as the "crime of crimes". The Political Instability Task Force estimated that 43 genocides occurred between 1956 and 2016, resulting in 50 million deaths. The UNHCR estimated that a further 50 million had been displaced by such episodes of violence.

Akkar Governorate (Arabic: محافظة عكار) is the northernmost governorate of Lebanon. It comprises the single district of Akkar, which in turn is subdivided into 121 municipalities. The capital is at Halba. It covers an area of 788 km (304 sq mi) and is bounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the west, North Governorate to the south, Baalbek-Hermel Governorate to the southeast, and the Syrian governorates of Tartus and Homs to the north and northeast. The governorate's western coastal plain constitutes Lebanon's second largest agricultural region after the Beqaa Valley, while the east features forested mountains that have been considered for protection as a national park.

The UNHCR estimated the population of the governorate at 389,899 in 2015, including 106,935 registered refugees of the Syrian Civil War and 19,404 Palestinian refugees. The population is predominantly Sunni Muslim around 70-75% with a minority of Christian and Alawite communities and very few Shiites. Akkar is Lebanon's least urbanized governorate, with 80% of the population living in rural areas.

The Ukrainian refugee crisis began with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. As of September 2025, the UNHCR has recorded 5.7 million Ukrainian refugees around the world, with 90% of this figure residing in various European countries outside of Ukraine. Older reports by the International Organization for Migration in May 2022 show approximately eight million Ukrainians as internally displaced persons. By 20 March 2022, nearly one-quarter of Ukraine's total population had been displaced due to active military hostilities with Russia. About 90% of all Ukrainian refugees are women and children; by 24 March, more than half of all children in Ukraine had left their homes, of whom a quarter had left the country as well. Men between the ages of 18 and 60 have been banned from leaving the country under Ukrainian martial law, which came into force a few hours into Russia's first military offensive into Ukraine. This ongoing escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War has caused the largest refugee crisis in the 21st century and the fourth-largest refugee crisis in modern history as a whole, with the highest refugee flight rate globally. It is also the first European refugee crisis since the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s and the largest one to have occurred in Europe since World War II.

The vast majority of Ukrainian refugees initially entered neighbouring countries to the west of Ukraine (Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Moldova). Around three million of these people then moved further west to other European countries. As of May 2025, the UNHCR reports that the countries in which the largest numbers of Ukrainians had applied for asylum, or other temporary protection, are Germany (1.2 million), Poland (1 million), and the Czech Republic (0.4 million). As of September 2022, Human Rights Watch has documented that Ukrainian civilians, particularly children, have been forcibly transferred to Russia. The OHCHR has corroborated this claim, stating that "There have been credible allegations of forced transfers of unaccompanied children to Russian-occupied territory, or to the Russian Federation itself." The United States Department of State estimated that at least 900,000 Ukrainian citizens (including children) were forcibly transferred to Russia in the first six months after the invasion. Around the same time in late 2022, more than 4.5 million Ukrainians had returned to Ukraine, owing to the withdrawal of Russian troops from all fronts but the Donbas and parts of southern Ukraine.

Third-country resettlement, or refugee resettlement, is, according to the UNHCR, one of three durable solutions (voluntary repatriation and local integration being the other two) for refugees who fled their home country. Resettled refugees have the right to reside long-term or permanently in the country of resettlement and may also have the right to become citizens of that country.

Resettled refugees may also be referred to as quota or contingent refugees, as countries only take a certain number of refugees each year. In 2016 there were 65.6 million forcibly displaced people worldwide and around 190,000 of them were resettled into a third country. Canada leads the world in refugee resettlement; it resettled more than 47,600 individuals in 2022. The United States led the world in refugee resettlement for decades till 2018.

Throughout the 20th century, Iraq witnessed multiple periods of instability and conflict that prompted the creation and flight of many refugees. Earlier examples include the exodus of Iraqi Jews and the flight of Iraqi Kurds. The Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980 and the ensuing Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988) triggered a deterioration of ties among the country's various ethnic and religious communities, and also exacerbated in violent events like the Ba'athist Arabization campaigns in northern Iraq (1968–2003), which led to the killing and displacement of thousands of minorities. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (1990) and the ensuing Gulf War (1990–1991), which ended with Iraq's defeat and the application of United Nations sanctions (1991–2003), also resulted in the creation of many Iraqi refugees. It was not until the beginning of the ongoing Iraqi conflict, however, that sustained waves of Iraqi refugees would be created, numbering in the millions: the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the ensuing Iraq War (2003–2011) killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, both internally and externally, and the later War in Iraq (2013–2017) forced even more people to flee from the country. Many Iraqi refugees established themselves in urban areas of other countries rather than in refugee camps.

In April 2007, there were approximately four million Iraqi refugees around the world, including: 1.9 million within Iraq; two million in neighbouring Arab countries, as well as in Iran and Turkey; and approximately 200,000 outside of the Middle East entirely. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has led the humanitarian efforts for Iraqi refugees. The number of displaced persons and refugees from the Iraqi conflict is considered to be the largest in the Middle East, though this figure may now be lower than that of the refugees of the Syrian civil war.

Baalbek-Hermel (Arabic: بعلبك - الهرمل) is a governorate of Lebanon and is the largest by area in the country. It comprises the districts of Baalbek and Hermel, which in turn are subdivided into a total of 74 municipalities. The capital is at Baalbek. The governorate covers an area of 3,009 km (1,162 sq mi) and is bounded by Akkar Governorate to the northwest, North Governorate to the west, Keserwan-Jbeil Governorate and Mount Lebanon Governorate to the southwest, Beqaa Governorate to the south, and the Syrian governorates of Homs and Rif Dimashq to the northeast and southeast. The governorate occupies the northern portion of the Beqaa Valley, Lebanon's most important agricultural area.

The UNHCR estimated the population of the governorate at 416,427 in 2015, including 137,788 registered refugees of the Syrian Civil War and 8,117 Palestinian refugees. The Lebanese citizen population is predominantly Shiite with pockets of Christians and Sunnis, while the refugee population is predominantly Sunni Muslims.