Border Monitoring Project Ukraine (BMPU)

While football fans may remember the controversy over hate speech ahead of the Euro 2012 games, two October 2012 developments in Ukraine have brought the need for human rights and refugee protection at Europe’s eastern borders back into the limelight. First, the Russian dissident Leonid Razvozzhayev was kidnapped from outside the UNHCR office in Kiev where he was claiming asylum, only to end up in Russian custody facing politically motivated charges. The following week, Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist party Svoboda, which openly supports a policy of ethnic cleansing, got as much as 12.5 percent of the votes in early polls, surpassing the threshold to enter parliament.

While these are indeed alarming developments, they are hardly new or surprising. They do, however, signal the need for international policies on refugee protection, freedom of movement, and human rights. Instead, EU policies created in the context of the economic crisis have fuelled a xenophobic moral panic about immigration, one that pushes ‘transit countries’ to institute securitisation and migration controls but remains out of touch with the lived realities of forced migration. As a result of such policies, for example, in February 2011 at least 1,400 sub-Saharan refugees fleeing racial persecution in North Africa drowned in the Mediterranean. There is much that remains mysterious about the conditions and policies that spur such dangerous border crossings – especially at eastern EU borders. Based on original evidence from the author’s recent field research on asylum migration to Ukraine, the goal of this article is to point to a fundamental contradiction between policies that seek to promote refugee protection abroad on the one hand but also institute controls on the freedom of movement. To this end, the article seeks to analyse the geopolitics and the integration initiatives that impact refugees in Ukraine, a country of transit and, increasingly, a sight of migration at the eastern border of Europe.

Read more

Although Ukraine has seen a steady decrease in the numbers of arriving and transiting migrants in recent years, EU policymakers remain fixated on the country as a stepping stone into Europe. A case in point is the enormous sums of money Europe has spent to boost its detention capacity. In 2011, 30 million Euros were allocated to build nine new detention centres in Ukraine, reportedly with the aim of locking up “readmitted” migrants sent by EU countries. However, even Ukraine’s Accounting Chamber, a parliamentary body that oversees the use of the national budget, has contended that the country’s existing migrant detention capacity exceeds its needs, pointing out that there are two guards for every detainee. Complementing Ukraine’s growing detention infrastructure have been a slate of new laws aimed in part at regulating the treatment of non-citizens in the country, including the adoption of new immigration legislation in 2011. Some observers have pointed to detention-related gaps in the new law, including its failure to prohibit the common practice of re-arresting migrants upon release and detaining them again for the maximum period allowed. For more information click the picture. Find a map of Ukrainian detention centres and detailed information here.

Some weeks ago, a press-article on the “Zhuravychi Migrant Accommodation Centre” was published. In this Detention Centre mainly Somali detainees started a hunger strike in the beginning of this year and called for their immediate release. According to the report, 98 persons are still imprisoned. Under them are 36 Somali citizens, 21 Afghans and 7 Moldavians. This means, that Ukraine is still violating the rights especially of Somali refugees, guaranteed inter alia in the European Convention on Human Rights. BMPU spoke to former hunger striker, who now stays in a neighboring EU-member state.

Continue reading ‘Interview with a former hunger striker’

In March 2012, Barbara Lochbihler (chair of the Subcommittee on Human Rights of the European Parliament) sent an official request to the European Commission concerning the detention of Somalis in Ukraine. Furthermore, Dr. Bärbel Kofler, member of the German parliament and chair of Ukraine-Germany interparliamentary Group sent an official request to the German government.

Continue reading ‘Answer given by High Representative/Vice-President Ashton on behalf of the Commission and the German government’

Almost three month after the Hunger Strike ended, the Somalis (and others) are still in detention. Although all of the Somalis got a document saying that they are in asylum procedure, they are still detained. Only some of them, who “finshed their 12 month” were released. Currently, 105 persons (out of them 45 Somalis) are still detained in Volyn Detention Center.

The particpants of the “Transborder conference”, which took place from the 15th – 18th March in Istanbul sent a gereeting to them:

Continue reading ‘After the Hunger Stirke’