The annual report of António Guterres, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, is not a sensationalist document: it is a sober assessment of statistics and trends among refugees, asylum seekers and displaced people fleeing conflict and persecution around the world.

The figures speak for themselves. After five years of a slow but steady decline in refugee numbers, they started to pick up again in 2006 and 2007. Afghanistan and Iraq are the two largest countries of origin, followed by Sudan, Somalia, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo.