EU’S MIGRATION CHIEF URGED TO SAVE STATELESS PEOPLE TRAPPED IN UKRAINE
▶ Roma and homeless Ukrainians are among the groups barred from entering neighbouring countries
Stateless people in Ukraine are struggling to escape the Russian invasion because they cannot prove they are allowed into the EU.
Under the bloc’s special refugee rules for Ukraine, stateless people are eligible to enter its member states only if they had international protection status before Russia invaded or if they cannot return to a safe country of origin.
About 35,000 people in Ukraine are estimated to be stateless. They include homeless people, members of minority groups such as Roma and older residents of Russian or Moldovan origin with defunct Soviet passports.
Children born in parts of the country occupied by Russia and pro-Moscow separatists since 2014 have also been affected, leaving them with uncertain status despite having grown up within Ukraine’s globally recognised borders.
Aid groups say most of the people in question are “stateless in their own country”, meaning Ukraine is their home and there is no other nation in which they can take shelter.
It leaves them in difficulty when they try to join the 5.7 million people who have fled Ukraine since Russia began its attack, most of whom have crossed the borders with Poland, Romania, Hungary or Slovakia.
The European Network on Statelessness is a coalition of 170 groups including charities and think tanks.
It has demanded a rethink from Brussels in a letter to
the EU migration chief, Ylva Johansson. The network’s director, Chris Nash, wrote that stateless people faced “burdensome procedures” at EU borders as they struggled to prove they lived in Ukraine or sought other forms of asylum.
“The latest information from our members suggests that stateless people and those at risk of statelessness fleeing
Ukraine are facing significant barriers to protection,” he said.
“If able to flee, stateless people and those at risk of statelessness face being stuck in limbo in the EU with options limited to applying for asylum, humanitarian protection or statelessness status.”
Russia’s two-month conflict has uprooted more than a quarter of Ukraine’s 41 million
people. In addition to the millions who have fled the country, about 7.7 million are internally displaced.
In February, the EU’s 27 countries invoked a mechanism called temporary protection to rapidly offer refugee status to millions of Ukrainians.
The measure has existed since 2001 but had never before been used. Intended to
ease the pressure at the bloc’s borders by circumventing the usual asylum process, it granted Ukrainians an automatic one-year residency permit.
This enabled them to work and study in any member state.
But Mr Nash told Ms Johansson that this was of little use to stateless people.
In his letter, he wrote that such people had to seek asylum through the slower traditional route.
Last year, Ukraine changed its law to grant temporary residency to some stateless people. But the UN refugee agency said that by the end of last year, only 55 people had been recognised in this way.
Many people in Ukraine who are of Roma origin do not have passports. The UN refugee agency said they often lacked any other paperwork, such as documents linked to property or employment, so they were struggling to obtain official proof of identity.
Aid groups have called on the EU’s authorities to address these problems by changing its operational guidelines to member states, the 16-page document that explains how to apply the rules.
The current document says stateless people must have a valid Ukrainian residency permit and their families are not automatically eligible for the same protection. Countries may, however, choose to offer this.
Activists want the guidance to be updated so that countries are encouraged to use a “margin of appreciation” to offer humanitarian protection to stateless people.
Such people should also be able to prove that they lived in Ukraine by showing other documents if they do not have a residency permit, the letter to Ms Johansson said.
“Now is a critical moment for the European Union and its member states to put into action their international and regional commitments to protecting the rights of stateless persons,” it said.