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From: "IRIN" <[email protected]>
Date: 7 Jul 2015 03:48
Subject: Your daily selection of IRIN Africa English reports, 7/6/2015
To: "Elisabeth Janaina" <[email protected]>
Cc:
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humanitarian news and analysis
Table of contents
1. Family reunion out of reach for many refugees in Europe
<#14e65fbec5dc71be_1>
2. Araya's story <#14e65fbec5dc71be_2>
------------------------------
*Family reunion out of reach for many refugees in Europe
<http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=101712>*
[image: lead photo]OXFORD, 6 July 2015 (IRIN) - Imagine that you have to
flee your country and, for whatever reason, you cannot take your family
with you. After a long and perilous journey, you finally reach a safe
country and successfully apply for asylum there. What will be your next and
most urgent priority? For the vast majority of us, it will be to ensure the
safety of the family we left behind and to be reunited with them as soon as
possible.
The same is true for most refugees arriving in Europe. According to EU
legislation, they have a right to be reunited with their closest family
members - usually their spouse and children under the age of 18 – but
realizing that right is another matter. Just as the number of refugees
arriving in Europe is rising, member states are making it more difficult
for their families to join them.
According to Anne Bathily, a senior policy officer at the European Council
on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE), an umbrella group for refugee organisations
in Europe, this is no coincidence. She points out that family reunification
is one of the few legal channels available for refugees to come to Europe
and suggests that states are keen to reduce such channels.
ECRE’s members report that the trend is towards more restrictive
eligibility criteria, more onerous requirements for supporting
documentation and less availability of state-funded legal aid to help
refugees navigate the increasingly complex application process.
Bathily told IRIN that national legislation on family reunification is
changing so rapidly that even some lawyers and NGOs providing legal advice
report having difficulty understanding the procedures, let alone refugees
who may not even speak the language.
*Unrealistic timeframes*
A 2003 EU Directive on the right to family reunification exempts refugees
from some of the more difficult conditions that other categories of
migrants have to comply with when applying, such as proof of sufficient
income and accommodation. But refugees only benefit from these exemptions
if they submit their applications within a certain timeframe after being
granted refugee status. In some member states, they have as little as three
months to make applications and those with subsidiary protection rather
than full refugee status don’t benefit from the exemptions at all. This is
despite the fact that in countries such as Hungary, subsidiary protection
is the main form of international protection given.
The UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR
<http://www.refworld.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/rwmain?docid=4f55e1cf2>, as well
as refugee rights groups have pointed out that three months is not a
realistic timeframe to submit family reunion applications. It can take
several months to trace the whereabouts of missing family members and
several more to track down the necessary documentation to support
applications such as birth and marriage certificates.
*Limited definition of family*
Under the EU Directive, member states are only required to recognize the
nuclear family as eligible for family reunification – spouses, minor
children and parents of unaccompanied minors. Most member states have stuck
to this limited definition which, according to Bathily, does not recognize
the way that forced migration can change the makeup of a family and their
dependency on extended family.
Vanessa Cowan, who manages the British Red Cross’s family reunion
assistance programme, noted that orphaned children are often raised by
aunts and uncles but are not eligible for refugee family reunion in the UK
unless they have been formally adopted. Elderly parents and children over
the age of 18 also don’t qualify. This can lead to parents having to leave
behind a child who may have just turned 18, but still be dependent.
*Long waits*
According to a report
<http://ecre.org/component/content/article/70-weekly-bulletin-articles/901-excessive-red-tape-prevents-refugees-from-reuniting-with-their-family-ecre-and-red-cross-eu-report-.html>
published jointly by ECRE and the Red Cross EU office in November 2014,
family reunification procedures for refugees “are extremely lengthy, often
lasting several years”. In just one example, a refugee in France waited
four years for a decision relating to reunification with his wife and three
children.
*Araya's story <http://www.irinnews.org/report/101714/araya-s-story>*
Araya, an Eritrean living in Birmingham, has been granted refugee status
but her husband has been refused a family reunion visa to join her and
their daughter.
*Read more* <http://www.irinnews.org/report/101714/araya-s-story>
Refugees, who have already been through gruelling journeys and lengthy
asylum procedures, are often unprepared for the length of time it can take
to reunite with their families, said Cowan. “It’s difficult for them to
cope with the knowledge that their families are vulnerable in another
country -they may be in danger, the children not going to school, not
having enough to eat.”
Being separated from their families also affects refugees’ ability to
integrate in their host countries, according to Bathily. “The impacts of
separation are huge. People can’t really settle and invest in their new
country when their first concern is what is happening back there?”
*Risky journeys*
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to family reunion for refugees is the fact
that applications have to be made by family members in their country of
origin, or where ever the nearest embassy may be. Typically, the “sponsor”
- who is the refugee already in the EU - begins the application, if they’re
lucky with some help from a lawyer or NGO, and then forwards it to the
family member who must complete it and bring it to the embassy where they
will be interviewed.
In conflict-affected countries like Syria, embassies are no longer
functioning and family members have to make costly and dangerous journeys
to neighbouring countries to reach an embassy, where they may have to
remain for several months while awaiting an outcome.
It's not rare that a family has left the place where they live to reach an
embassy and has been subjected to violence on the way.
“In the cases that we’ve helped, it’s not rare that a family has left the
place where they live to reach an embassy and has been subjected to
violence on the way,” said Cowan.
The ECRE/Red Cross report gives the example of a Syrian woman and her child
who were trying to reach the Belgian embassy in Ankara to make an
application, but were arrested at the Turkish border. The woman’s brother
and brother-in-law, who were travelling with them, were killed - the report
did not explain how - and the woman and her child were detained for several
days before having to return to Syria.
The final obstacle is often one of cost. If and when a reunification visa
is finally granted, the cost of flying family members to Europe may be
unaffordable. The British Red Cross provides travel assistance for refugee
families to reunite, but such assistance isn’t available in all member
states.
“Sometimes it doesn’t happen because people don’t have sufficient money to
pay travel costs,” said Bathily.
Figures for how many refugees in Europe successfully reunite with family
members aren’t available because their applications are not tracked
separately from those made by other categories of migrants, but UNHCR has
noted that the numbers are low and make up a very small percentage of
overall migration to Europe.
UNHCR has advocated for swifter, more efficient family reunification
procedures for refugees in Europe, particularly for Syrians, but there is
little indication that member states are prepared to make the process any
easier.
“When you’re uprooted, your family becomes your country; it represents
everything you left behind,” said Bathily.
“But this is where you see the tension between state interests and
individual interests. [States are] saying that being generous in family
reunification is a pull factor.”
ks/am
Access report online <http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=101712>
------------------------------
*Araya's story <http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=101714>*
[image: lead photo]BIRMINGHAM, 6 July 2015 (IRIN) - *After being granted
refugee status in Europe, most refugees are keen to reunite with their
families as soon as possible, but family reunification
<http://www.irinnews.org/report/101712/family-reunion-out-of-reach-for-many-refugees-in-europe>
procedures for refugees have become increasingly restrictive and complex in
many member states. IRIN spoke to a UK-based Eritrean refugee about her
experience. *
On the streets of Birmingham, Araya is just another single mother pushing
her two-year-old daughter in a pram. In this multi-ethnic city, the only
thing that sets her apart at first glance is her sightless right eye.
Araya was born in Eritrea but moved to Ethiopia with her family soon
afterwards and spent most of her childhood there until war broke out
between the two countries. Her father was imprisoned in Ethiopia, and died
there soon afterwards, while the rest of the family – Araya, her brother
and sister and mother - were deported back to Eritrea along with tens of
thousands of other Eritreans.
The family struggled to fit in to life back in Eritrea. Araya, who was then
14, did not speak the local language of Tigrinya, and her mother, who
worked as a teacher, was forbidden from practicing her faith as a
Pentecostal Christian – one of many banned religions in Eritrea. She
ignored the prohibition and even taught some of her students about
Pentecostalism.
“One day the police came to our house to arrest her,” says Araya, beginning
to cry at the memory.
“They started to beat her in front of us. I was angry and tried to push
them away. They punched me in the eye and it started to bleed.
“They took my mother, brother and sister and left me bleeding…I never heard
from them again. I still don’t know what happened to my family.”
Araya suddenly found herself completely alone. A neighbour took her in for
a short time but she decided to return to Ethiopia with a friend of her
father’s who accompanied her on the dangerous journey across the border
into Sudan. There they found an Iraqi doctor who confirmed that she had
lost the use of her eye but offered to take her back to Iraq with him where
he promised to treat her and send her to school with his own children. Her
father’s friend agreed.
“When we arrived [in Iraq], he didn’t treat me, he just made me work in his
home – a big house with three floors. I cleaned all of it and I wasn’t
allowed to go out. His wife was always threatening to kill me if her
husband even looked at me. She looked for any excuse to blame me and
sometimes she beat me with her shoes,” recalls Araya, who was to spend the
next seven years confined to that house except for occasional shopping
trips with the doctor’s wife.
On one such trip, she spotted an Eritrean man in the shopping centre. “I
started crying and although we couldn’t understand each other, he knew I
was in trouble.” He slipped her a mobile phone and his number. When they
got home, she hid the phone in the rubbish bin so that she could call him
when she took out the rubbish.
“I waited until the family was asleep and then I called him. He had a
friend with him who could speak Amharic and I told him everything. They
told me to try to escape the house and they’d help me leave the country.”
One day soon afterwards, the family forgot to lock the door and Araya made
her escape. As promised, the two men paid a smuggler to take her across
Iraq’s border with Syria where she walked for seven days with a group of
Iraqi refugees, until they reached Turkey. She stayed at a smuggler’s house
full of other migrants and refugees who were waiting to continue on to
Greece. There she met someone who knew a childhood friend of hers from
Ethiopia who was now living in Athens. Daniel was the first familiar name
she had heard in seven years. She latched on to it and decided to go to
Athens to look for him. She didn’t have a phone number so when she arrived
in the Greek capital, she went to the Pentecostal church where many
Ethiopians and Eritreans congregated every Sunday. No one knew Daniel, but
she found an instant community there and moved into a house with some of
the other congregants. Every Sunday she returned to the church and one
Sunday, Daniel was there. They didn’t immediately recognize each other, but
he had heard about the injury to her eye and guessed who she was.
Neither Araya nor Daniel had documents to legalize their stay in Greece,
but Daniel had what Araya describes as “a good job” and he helped her get a
part-time job with the same employer. She tried to apply for asylum in
Greece but never reached the front of the long queue outside the Aliens’
Directorate in Athens.
When Araya and Daniel decided to get married their lack of papers meant
they had to settle for a blessing at home. The wedding pictures show Araya
in a traditional white wedding dress and Daniel in a suit, smiling into the
camera.
Fast forward two years of married life and Araya was pregnant with their
first child. She was feeling sick and had stayed at home on the day Daniel
phoned to tell her that he had been arrested. It was May 2012 and the Greek
government had stepped up arrests of undocumented migrants in the
increasingly restive capital. Daniel was taken to a detention centre and
Araya lost phone contact with him.
“I waited until September. I was pregnant, I couldn’t work, and I couldn’t
pay the rent. I had 1,000 Euros of my husband’s savings left. I used it to
pay a Sudanese guy for a fake passport to get me to France.”
>From France, Araya crossed to the UK where she had heard that life would be
better: “You can practice your religion and if you have a child, they help
you.”
She applied for asylum there and received refugee status a month later. But
Daniel was still missing. She approached the Red Cross office in Birmingham
to help her to trace him, but before they could find him, she heard from a
friend in Greece that Daniel had been released from detention and returned
to Ethiopia to look for her.
With contact re-established, Araya immediately began the process of
applying for Daniel to join her and their soon-to-be-born daughter in the
UK through a procedure called family reunion. Legal aid for family reunion
applications was cut in the UK in 2013 so Araya, who was living on income
support, borrowed money from her local Eritrean community to pay a lawyer
£400 ($625) to help her. Gathering the supporting documentation wasn’t easy
but she managed to get a certificate from the pastor in Greece who had
married them as well as a letter from their employer. After the application
was submitted, Daniel had to be interviewed at the British embassy in Addis
Ababa.
The whole process took about six months but Araya never doubted that
Daniel’s application would be accepted. When the refusal letter came,
noting that Daniel’s last name was missing from their daughter’s birth
certificate and the evidence proving they had been together in Greece was
insufficient, the shock was devastating. “I wasn’t expecting it. He’s my
husband and we have a child together.”
Daniel also took the news badly. The stress of being separated from his
wife and baby and living in Ethiopia without legal status or a job was
making him ill. He suffered from high blood pressure and by January 2015
was so sick that Araya decided to fly to Addis to see him. Daniel met his
daughter, who was now nearly two, for the first time and the family spent
three months together. Araya could not stay any longer. She was in the
process of appealing the refusal and also could not risk losing her income
support. Now back in the UK and pregnant with a second child, all her hopes
are pinned on a court hearing due to take place in August.
She refuses to contemplate the possibility of another rejection. Now in her
late twenties, she is still waiting for her life to truly begin.
*Names have been changed
ks
Access report online <http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=101714>
------------------------------
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