Nigeria ranks third after Syria, Iraq in number of displaced persons

The National Human Rights Commission, NHRC, said about one million people has been displaced from their homes, Nigeria has the third highest number of Internally Displaced Persons, IDPs, in the world, coming behind war-torn Syria and Iraq

Chairman of the commission, Prof Chidi Odinkalu made this known yesterday he said: “It was responsible for displacing more than three-quarters of at least 975,300 people in the country during the year, while many others fled inter-communal violence in the Middle Belt region,” Odinkalu said.

According to the IDMC, as at the end of 2014, 38 million people around the world had been forced to flee their homes by armed conflicts and generalised violence, and were living in displacement within the borders of their own country while 11 million people were newly displaced during the year, the equivalent of 30,000 fleeing each day.

“Never in the last 10 years of IDMC’s global reporting, from the peak of the Darfur crisis in 2004, have we reported such a high estimate for the number of people newly displaced in a year. Today, there are almost twice as many IDPs as there are refugees worldwide,”