Uzbek Asylum Seekers Under Pressure
Monday, 18 August, 2008
Uzbek Asylum Seekers Under Pressure
Monday, 18 August, 2008
On August 14, a group of Uzbek asylum seekers said that the State Committee for Migration and Employment had refused to extend their certificates of registration that grant them the right to stay in Kyrgyzstan while the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR, reviews their case.
The state committee gives everyone seeking refugee status in a third country a certificate registering their application. After receiving this certificate, asylum seekers then apply to UNHCR for refugee status in another country.
It can take UNHCR several months to decide on whether an applicant will be granted refugee status. The registration certificate issued by the Kyrgyz state committee, which allows asylum seekers to move freely in Kyrgyzstan, can be extended for up to a year, while an applicant’s asylum case is reviewed by the UN body.
However, the Kyrgyz authorities have reportedly begun to reject applications from Uzbek asylum seekers applying for extensions to stay on Kyrgyz territory, while their cases are being decided.
“They refused me verbally, without giving me any official document, but said they notified the UN High Commissioner for Refugees they would not extend the terms for those seeking asylum,” said Sarvar Kuchkarov, a refugee from Andijan, who first received the registration certificate before applying for refugee status in February this year.
Without a valid registration allowing them to remain in Kyrgyzstan, asylum seekers face coming under pressure from officials and police.
Sarvar found out that the State Committee for Migration and Employment refused to extend seven other Uzbek nationals’ right to stay in Kyrgyzstan at the same time that he was refused.
The Kyrgyz authorities have declined to comment on the development.
Anna Ni, an expert on refugee rights, told NBCA that she was unable to get an “exhaustive answer” on this issue from officials from the Committee for Migration and Employment.
“However, we hope that after negotiations [with the Kyrgyz authorities] this difficult situation may be rectified,” she said.
Vitaliy Ponomarev, head of the Central Asian project of the Moscow-based NGO Memorial, sees “nothing strange” in the fact that Kyrgyz authorities have started to refuse extensions for Uzbek refugees.
He suggested that the Kyrgyz government was trying to prompt UNHCR into speeding up decisions on asylum cases.
“They [the Kyrgyz authorities] want to push the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to take quick decisions,” he said.
“This is reasonable because for years there has been a practice in Kyrgyzstan where applications are accepted and registered [by the Kyrgyz authorities] but no decisions were made [by the UNHCR] which looked absurd,” said Ponomarev.
After the Andijan uprising of May 2005, when Uzbek security forces shot into a crowd of demonstrators in the eastern city, killing hundreds, refugees poured into neighbouring Kyrgyzstan.
Some 400 received refugee status and were granted asylum in European countries, Europe and the US, but around 100 remain in Uzbekistan still awaiting their fate, according to Alisher Sarbon, a Bishkek-based publisher of Khijrat Sarboni (Emigrant’s Guide) newspaper for refugees.
Without documentation granting them the right to remain, they are living in fear of being returned to Uzbekistan.
“Many refugees are afraid to walk the streets of Kyrgyzstan; they have no migration documents. This is especially true in the run-up to Independence Day [August 31] when passport checks on the streets will be stepped up,” said Sarbon.
(NBCentralAsia is an IWPR-funded project to create a multilingual news analysis and comment service for Central Asia, drawing on the expertise of a broad range of political observers across the region. The project ran from August 2006 to September 2007, covering all five regional states. With new funding, the service is resuming, covering only Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan for the moment.)
