“Refugees leave because they have no choice. We must choose to help,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in his message to mark the Day, observed annually on 20 June.

Earlier this week the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) released its Global Trends 2011 report, which updates the number of people of concern to the agency, including refugees, asylum-seekers, the stateless and internally displaced people.

It showed that a record 800,000 people were forced to flee across borders last year, more than at any time since 2000. The new refugees are part of a total of 4.3 million people who were newly displaced last year, owing to a string of major humanitarian crises that began in late 2010 in Côte d’Ivoire, and followed by others in Libya, Somalia, Sudan and elsewhere.

“These numbers represent far more than statistics; they are individuals and families whose lives have been upended, whose communities have been destroyed, and whose future remains uncertain,” said Mr. Ban.

The UN chief stressed the need to work together to mobilize the political will and leadership to prevent and end the conflicts that trigger refugee flows. And where security is restored, it is vital to address the underlying causes of conflict, allowing sustainable refugee return through access to livelihoods, services and the rule of law, he added.

The focus for UNHCR this year will be in Brazil, where the High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, will be spending World Refugee Day in Rio de Janeiro at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20).

Mr. Guterres arrived in Rio de Janeiro following a weekend visit to Ecuador, where he pledged to continue working to ensure the rights of the largest refugee population in South America. He met urban refugees from Colombia and discussed the challenges they face, including problems with documentation, during his visit to the port of Guayaquil and to the capital, Quito.

UNHCR is also marking the Day by rolling out a new campaign, called ‘Dilemmas,’ which depicts some of the tough choices facing refugees, helping the public to empathize with, and understand, their dilemma.

It is being supported in special television spots by UNHCR Special Envoy Angelina Jolie and other celebrities, including some of the agency’s many Goodwill Ambassadors.

“Unfortunately, the world is producing displaced people faster than it is producing solutions to displacement. And the solutions are not exclusively humanitarian – they are also political,” Ms. Jolie said in a message to mark the Day.

She added, “The international community should rededicate itself to preventing conflict, addressing it when it erupts, and solving it more quickly, for that is the only way to create durable solutions for the refugees whose strength inspires us on this World Refugee Day.”

UNHCR has also developed a free smart-phone application, a role playing game called ‘My Life as a Refugee,’ to support the campaign on various digital platforms around the world.

The new refugees are part of a total of 4.3 million people who were newly displaced last year, owing to a string of major humanitarian crises that began in late 2010 in Côte d’Ivoire, and followed by others in Libya, Somalia, Sudan and elsewhere, according to Global Trends 2011, issued by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

“2011 saw suffering on an epic scale. For so many lives to have been thrown into turmoil over so short a space of time means enormous personal cost for all who were affected,” said the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, in a news release.

“We can be grateful only that the international system for protecting such people held firm for the most part and that borders stayed open. These are testing times,” he added.

Some 42.5 million people ended 2011 either as refugees (15.2 million), internally displaced (26.4 million) or in the process of seeking asylum (895,000), according to the report, which is UNHCR’s main publication on the state of forced displacement.

At the same time, 2011 saw some 3.2 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) return home – the highest rate of returns of IDPs in more than a decade.

Among the “worrying” trends noted in the report, UNHCR said that forced displacement is affecting larger numbers of people globally, with the annual level exceeding 42 million people for each of the last five years.

Another is that a person who becomes a refugee is likely to remain as one for many years – often stuck in a camp or living precariously in an urban location. Of the 10.4 million refugees under UNHCR’s mandate, almost three quarters (7.1 million) have been in exile for at least five years awaiting a solution.

Overall, Afghanistan remains the biggest producer of refugees (2.7 million) followed by Iraq (1.4 million), Somalia (1.1 million), Sudan (500,000) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (491,000).

Among industrialized countries, Germany ranks as the largest hosting country with 571,700 refugees. South Africa, meanwhile, was the largest recipient of individual asylum applications (107,000), a status it has held for the past four years.

While UNHCR’s original mandate was to help refugees, its work over the past six decades has grown to include helping many of the world’s IDPs and those who are stateless – those lacking recognized citizenship and the human rights that accompany this.

The report notes that only 64 governments provided data on stateless people, meaning that UNHCR was able to capture numbers for only around a quarter of the estimated 12 million stateless people worldwide.

World Refugee Day falls on Wednesday, 20 June. The theme for this year’s observance is “Refugees have no choice. You do.” and focuses on the tough choices facing refugees, helping the public to empathize with, and understand, their dilemma.