HIGHLIGHTS
Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Stephen O-Brien, in his statement to the Security Council on Syria on 27 October stressed that the Syrian crisis urgently requires a political solution which addresses the root causes of the conflict and meets the aspirations of the Syrian people who have suffered for far too long. In the absence of such a solution, Mr. O-Brien hoped that the Council and relevant Member States will continue to use their influence with the parties to the conflict to remind them to uphold their obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law, to distinguish between civilians and combatants, and to take all feasible precautions to avoid further civilian injury and loss of life. Full statement is available at http://reliefweb.int/node/1236556
There has been no significant increase in the registration of new arrivals from Syria in the host countries in the region with the exception of Turkey, where the number of registration of Syrians who had previously arrived to Turkey has increased significantly over the year. The net number of arrivals since 1 January 2015 is 380,040 persons, nearly all of whom were registered in Turkey. The slowing or flattening of arrival rates is due to, among others, increasingly managed borders and restrictions to registration. Moreover, further to ongoing verification exercises, the numbers of registered Syrian refugees has decreased in Lebanon and Egypt and only slightly increased in the rest of the region. Since January, a total of 213,085 Syrians were ‘inactivated’ or had their cases ‘closed’ as they were deemed to no longer be present in the host country. UNHCR conducts regular verification exercises to review their needs and update its information about registered Syrian refugees.
The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the Presidents of the World Bank (WB) Group and the Islamic Development Bank Group have announced a joint initiative to scale-up financing in the Middle East and North Africa to help countries hosting significant refugee populations, countries impacted by conflict, as well as countries that have significant investment needs to achieve economic recovery. The proposed financing initiative consists of two distinct mechanisms - under the first mechanism, guarantees from donor countries would be leveraged in order to issue special bonds to finance economic recovery and reconstruction projects, and in the second mechanism, grants from donor countries would be used to provide concessional finance to middle income countries of the region hosting the bulk of refugees. The financing initiative was presented at an international ministerial roundtable on the sidelines of the annual meetings of the WB and International Monetary Fund (IMF).