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Recently, a media article with the title “TYPICAL MYTHS – ATYPICAL MIGRATION” was published in Ukrainian media. In this article statistics on “illegal” migration to/through Ukraine – and their misinterpretation and propaganda through the radical right in Ukraine – is discussed. Therefore, BMPU roughly translated the article. The original article can be found here.

Continue reading ‘TYPICAL MYTHS – ATYPICAL MIGRATION’

[…] UNHCR concludes that Ukraine is failing to provide sufficient protection against refoulement, and does not provide asylum-seekers with the opportunity to have their asylum claims considered in an efficient and fair procedure. Ukraine therefore should not be considered as a safe third country. UNHCR further urges States not to return asylum-seekers to Ukraine on this basis.

Download the report here.

UNHCR Ukraine recently stated (source):

UNHCR is pleased that the draft legislation currently under consideration would bring Ukrainian practices related to migrant detention into line with international and European standards, and encourages lawmakers to positively consider the proposed improvements. In practice, a significant proportion of persons detained for migration-related offenses choose to seek asylum, and therefore are persons of concern to UNHCR. When foreigners are detained for the purposes of deportation, this detention does not service the usual purposes of detention, neither punishment nor deterrence.  Punishments for administrative violations, like attempting to cross the border without valid documentation, are available in law, and are usually short (e.g., 15 days administrative detention).  When individuals are detained for purposes of deportation, with lengthy periods of detention up to 12 months, the only purpose of that detention is to gather the information and documentation necessary to implement the deportation. Legislation relating to this detention needs to contain procedural safeguards to ensure that this detention serves its purpose, and that the deportation order is actually lawful and enforceable.

Current legislation allows for administrative bodies, such as the State Border Guard Service, to authorize the detention of  foreigners, apprehended within controlled border districts during an attempt or after illegal state border crossing at the MCCs, without the guarantee of a speedy judicial review of that decision.

At present, many foreigners are detained for a full twelve months at public expense without any efforts being made to actually implement their deportation.  Besides being a questionable use of scarce resources, this situation also violates the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights, which stipulates that if deportation of an individual is not being implemented by the authorities with due diligence, the detention of that individual becomes unlawful.

Once again, it must be noted that it was the European Union which pushed Ukraine to build up new detention cites and supported (and still supports) the construction and running with (financial) resources, as documented in detail on this website. That after decades of influence of the European Union in the Ukrainian migration regime – with the result of thousands of unlawfully detained (potential) asylum-seekers – only now maybe (!) a law according to the standards of the European Convention on Human Rights will be implemented must be heavily criticized. Should the European Union – the so-called “space of freedom, security and justice” not take care about that before pushing and supporting Ukraine to detain (potential) irregular border crossers for up to twelve month?

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.

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In December 2012, UNHCR Ukraine published a statement concerning the newly-adopted amendments in Ukraine. UNHCR states, that these

amendments to the Law on the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine give the State Border Guard Service the power to authorize the detention of foreigners and stateless persons in the Migrant Custody Centre, if the individuals were detained in the border regions while attempting or making an illegal border crossing. Until now, such detentions have been authorized by a court, not an administrative body, and this is the better approach. According to the Ukrainian constitution, detention should be authorized by a court (Art. 29), and European human rights law reinforces this norm, which is a fundamental guarantee for individual liberty.

Continue reading ‘Migrants can be detained without court decisions’