According to the Global Trends Report published by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 2019, there are 70.8 million refugees around the world. Turkey, with the influence of geography, hosted more than 4 million refugees and became one of the most refugee-hosting countries all over the world. June the 20th, Refugee Day is an important day reminding people that it is necessary to stay away from discriminatory, marginalizing, and targeted discourses and also states that refugees have a basic right and freedom to establish a decent life for human dignity and human rights.
June the 20th, Refugee Day was celebrated for the first time in 2001. It is a celebrated day to remind the universal rights and liberties of every human refugee living in the world, as well as the difficulties such as being targeted, marginalized and not reaching human rights.
In 2011, with the outbreak of civil war in Syria, there wasn’t any safe zone left for Syrians, in their own country, and a massive migration movement towards Turkey has begun. The Republic of Turkey has accepted the Syrian refugees with the open-door policy by fulfilling a basic requirement of international refugee law.
In Turkey today, there are over 4 million people living as under temporary protection, and as refugees and 3.7 million of them are Syrians. As well as accepting the displaced people to the country only, it has been tried to ensure that the primary rights such as housing, health, and education were fulfilled. Intense efforts were made to prevent the arise of lost generations, and touching the lives of people by making emergency interventions to the crisis by the projects of the Republic of Turkey’s, collaborations with the European Union and many projects carried out with other stakeholder institutions.
The number of refugees in Turkey, due to its proximity to the war zones in the Middle East, has increased rapidly in the recent past. Many action plans were prepared against this rapid increase. Some of these are ABC and BCA Projects carried out by the Ministry of National Education, Construction and Real Estate Department through KFW and WB with the financial support of the European Union. With these projects, 401 schools are planned to be built in 19 cities where Syrians live densely, for the 1.1 million school-aged children’s education access. The construction of 60 prefabricated (steel construction) schools, including inside the camp sites, was started immediately for the purpose of emergency response to the crisis.
With 401 schools to be built in our current projects, we are creating an additional capacity of 6404 classrooms and 192,460 students in 19 provinces. With this capacity increase, it is aimed to prevent many generations of refugee children to continue their education and prevent the lost generations that may occur and to protect the right of every child to have equal access to education. Because education is the fundamental right of every child regardless of any kind of discrimination.
According to UN reports; The number of refugees reaching the highest rates of the last 70 years in the world will continue to increase in the coming periods. On the June the 20th Refugee Day, we need to remember that in the near future we will perhaps give the greatest test of our time for a fair and egalitarian world where the fundamental rights and freedoms of all refugee people such as life, health, and education are not ignored.
Happy June the 20th World Refugee Day
