UNHCR, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (or the UN Refugee Agency), is a global organization dedicated to saving lives, protecting rights and building a better future for refugees, forcibly displaced communities and stateless people.
We work to ensure that everybody has the right to seek asylum and find safe refuge, having fled violence, persecution, war or disaster at home.
Since 1950, we have faced multiple crises on multiple continents, and provided vital assistance to refugees, asylum-seekers, internally displaced and stateless people, many of whom have nobody left to turn to.
UNHCR in Jordan
Since the early 1990s, UNHCR operations in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan have been relatively small, serving a few thousand refugees and asylum-seekers from several countries in the Middle East and North Africa region. In the aftermath of the Iraqi war in 2003, and until 2010, UNHCR Jordan was focusing primarily on meeting the needs of a few thousand refugees, mainly from Iraq.
After the crisis in Syria erupted in March 2011, however, tens of thousands – and later hundreds of thousands – of Syrian refugees were forced to flee across the border and seek international protection in Jordan.
Syria’s ongoing war, with 6.6 million internally displaced persons, and more than 5.6 million displaced in the surrounding region and beyond, has made the Middle East the world’s largest producer and host of forcibly displaced population. Over 660,000 Syrian refugees are currently registered with UNHCR in Jordan*. Additionally, the Kingdom hosts refugees of Iraqi, Yemeni, Sudanese, Somali and other nationalities, for a total of over 750,000 individual, making Jordan one of the countries with the highest refugee population per capita, and placing enormous pressure on the country and its host communities. UNHCR Jordan is now running three main offices across the Kingdom (Amman, Irbid and Mafraq).
UNHCR works closely with the Government of Jordan and numerous other national and international partners in providing protection and assistance to refugees and asylum seekers, as well as to Jordanian communities affected by the refugee influx.’
* As of December 2018