Displaced person
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| 63.912 million | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Refugees | 15.483 million |
| IDPs | 37.494 million |
| Asylum seekers | 3.219 million |
| People in refugee-like situation | 637,534 |
A displaced person (sometimes abbreviated DP) is a person who has been forced to leave his or her home or place of habitual residence, a phenomenon known as forced migration.
According to the UNHCR, there were 59.5 million forcibly displaced people worldwide at the end of 2014, the highest level since World War II: 19.5 million were refugees, 1.8 million asylum seekers and 38.2 million internally displaced persons.
The term was first widely used during World War II and the resulting refugee outflows from Eastern Europe, when it was used to specifically refer to one removed from his or her native country as a refugee, prisoner or a slave laborer. The meaning has significantly broadened in the past half-century. A displaced person may also be referred to as a forced migrant. The term "refugee" is also commonly used as a synonym for displaced person, causing confusion between the general descriptive class of anyone who has left their home and the subgroup of legally defined refugees who enjoy specified international legal protection. Most of the victims of war, political refugees and DPs of the immediate post-Second World War period were Ukrainians, Poles, other Slavs, as well as citizens of the Baltic states - Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians, who refused to return to Soviet-dominated eastern Europe.
A.J. Jaffe claimed that the term was originally coined by Eugene M. Kulischer.
If the displaced person has crossed an international border and falls under one of the relevant international legal instruments, they may become considered a refugee. A displaced person who left his or her home because of political persecution or violence, but did not cross an international border, is commonly considered to be the less well-defined category of internally displaced person (IDP), and is subject to more tenuous international protection. Bogumil Terminski distinguishes two general categories of internal displacement: displacement of risk (mostly conflict-induced displacement, deportations and disaster-induced displacement) and displacement of adaptation (associated with voluntary resettlement, development-induced displacement and environmentally-induced displacement). A displaced person who crosses an international border without permission from the country they are entering, and without applying for asylum, may be considered an illegal immigrant.
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