Kazak Rights Defenders to Raise Uzbek Refugee Concerns

The plight of Uzbek asylum-seekers in Kazakstan is to be raised at an international conference on refugees and migration in Almaty on March 15-16.

The event is being held jointly by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Organisation and will be attended by officials, analysts and NGO representatives from the five Central Asian states and neighbouring states like Afghanistan, Iran, Azerbaijan and China.

Last year, the government of Kazakstan introduced new rules under which the national authorities will decide who is awarded refugee status. This meant that even asylum-seekers who had already been assigned refugee status by the UNHCR had to re-apply to the government.

The decision was particularly alarming for asylum-seekers from neighbouring Uzbekistan, where the government frequently seeks the return or extradition of such individuals.

Last June, the Kazak authorities conducted a sweep of asylum-seekers, detaining 29 people accused of offences in Uzbekistan. Seventeen of the detainees did have UNHCR refugee status but were stripped of it under the new national regulations. 

"There’s still a lot of confusion surrounding the state’s take-over of the process of defining refugee status," Denis Jivaga of the Kazakstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law said.

Jivaga said that when he attended the UNHCR/IOM event, he would ask “how the state will act in future cases where Uzbek refugees are detained and then denied refugee status, given that they must not be deported to a country where they are at risk of torture".

"How will the authorities in Kazakstan treat such people and what status will they give them? We’ll definitely be raising this question," he said.

This article was produced as part of IWPR’s News Briefing Central Asia output, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.