Ukraine is not safe for refugees, and European countries should not return asylum-seekers to Ukraine, as it cannot be considered as a safe third country.
Such are the conclusions of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in a report on the situation of asylum-seekers and refugees in Ukraine, presented in Geneva on July 26 and in Kyiv on July 30.
The results also go against a 2007 European Union-Ukraine readmission agreement, which stated that asylum seekers or refugees detained in the EU, who arrived illegally from Ukraine, are to be sent back to Eastern European country.
“Despite significant progress in recent years, Ukraine’s asylum system still requires fundamental improvements: it does not offer sufficient protection against (resettlement), and does not provide asylum-seekers the opportunity to have their asylum claims considered in an efficient and fair procedure. Therefore, Ukraine should not be considered as a safe third country and UNHCR further urges States not to return asylum-seekers to Ukraine on this basis,” reads the summary of the report.
Citizens of former Soviet Union countries “have particularly low chances of obtaining refugee status in Ukraine,” it continues. This certainly seems to be the case: of the 775 persons from Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and the Russian Federation who applied for international protection in Ukraine in 2010-2012, just three received the protected status.
Statistics shows that Ukraine granted protection to Russian citizens from 2005 to 2010, during Viktor Yushchenko’s presidency.
However, since 2010, when Viktor Yanukovych became president, only two Russians have received the status out of 107 applicants. Meanwhile, Russians are the second largest group who receive refugee status in the EU, after Afghans.
Most of those who apply for refugee status in Ukraine are wanted in Russia for staging or participating in protests. In 2013, Ukraine turned down four Russian opposition activists – all participants of the so-called Bolotnaya Square case, which was opened on the basis of alleged mass rioting and violence against police during the anti-government protest in Moscow on May 6, 2012. All four filed a court appeal.
The UNHCR says these cases “raise concerns about whether decision-making in these cases is fair, objective and non-discriminatory.”
The State Migration Service does not comment on particular cases, but the head of its asylum department, Natalia Naumenko, says applicants are turned down because they “did not produce sufficient information confirming that their return to the country of origin would endanger them.”
“Nobody is putting pressure on the State Migration Service. There is no pressure from the Presidential Administration, the Cabinet of Ministers, the Ministry of Internal Affairs or the Foreign Ministry,” says Deputy Head of the State Migration Service Vasyl Grytsak.
Because of the large number of refusals, the UNHCR is trying to resettle people turned down by Ukraine in other countries. According to Oldrich Andrysek, the regional UNHCR representative, in 2013 10 people were resettled from Ukraine in France, four in Canada, four in Austria, two in the U.S. and one in Sweden, as “Ukraine is rejecting people who, we believe, have very strong refugee cases.”
The UNHCR urges Ukraine to change its system as it “reiterates it cannot constantly replace government and resettle people to the third countries, where international law is respected.”
“Being a middle income country in Europe, Ukraine has about 2,500 recognized refugees and annually receives approximately 1,500 asylum applications. This is a very modest number in comparison to many regions bordering countries with ongoing conflict like Afghanistan, Syria or Somalia,” said UNHCR spokesperson Melissa Fleming at a press briefing in Geneva on July 26.
Grytsak agrees that much more needs to be done. He says the service is working on simplifying the paperwork, a big problem for many asylum-seekers and refugees who often have no document confirming their identity. Those who were turned down by the State Migration Service and are in the process of appealing usually have no papers for years.
“Recently I have learned of a case when a man in Odesa lived with no documents for 7 years. These people cannot work, cannot open a bank account, cannot marry, cannot go to a hospital – they have no documentation,” says Andrysek.
Despite the need for fundamental change of the system, the report also marks some recent progress, such as the adoption of the Law on Refugees and progress on refugee’s access to education and medical services. Ukraine is also praised for the 2012 introduction of complementary protection, an international term used to describe a category of protection for people who are not refugees as defined in the Refugees Convention, but who cannot be sent back to the country of origin due to the risk that they would face.
In 2012 Ukraine granted complementary protection to 41 people from Somalia, 17 from Afghanistan, 16 from Syria, two from Palestine and eight from Iraq.
Kyiv Post staff writer Svitlana Tuchynska can be reached at [email protected].
