Forced displacement surged to historic new levels across the globe last year and this, according to the 2024 flagship Global Trends Report from the UNHCR, the UN refugee agency. 

The rise in overall forced displacement – to 120 million by May 2024 – was the 12th consecutive annual increase and reflects both new and mutating conflicts and a failure to resolve long-standing crises.

“A key factor driving the figures higher has been the devastating conflict in Sudan: at the end of 2023, 10.8 million Sudanese remained uprooted,” the UNHCR said.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Myanmar, millions were internally displaced last year by vicious fighting. UNRWA estimates that by the end of last year, up to 1.7 million people (75 percent of the population) had been displaced in the Gaza Strip by the catastrophic violence, most of whom were Palestine refugees. Syria remains the world’s largest displacement crisis, with 13.8 million forcibly displaced in and outside the country.

In a new research briefing, Amnesty International “documents extensively the ways in which technology contributes to the growing trend of human rights violations at borders and urges that states stop using such technologies until they can ensure their use does not violate  human rights,” the group said on May 21.

The briefing, The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, and Inequality, outlines how the use of new technologies by both state and non-state actors in migration systems across the world increases the likelihood that the human rights of people on the move—including the rights to privacy, non-discrimination, equality, and to seek asylum—will be violated, Amnesty International said.

The technologies “also exacerbate underlying racial, economic, and social inequalities at borders and beyond. Migrant workers and others with insecure citizenship status are often subject to the same forms of digitally enabled surveillance, monitoring, and exploitation as asylum seekers and refugees, and are similarly targeted by these technologies because of their inability to opt out or seek redress from harm,” Amnesty International said.