UKRAINE: EU deportation regime adopted
01 May 2002
On 15 May, six Vietnamese undocumented migrants were "repatriated" via Paris to Hanoi on a Ukrainian International Airlines flight. The Ukrainian Border Police publicised the deportation as a success in the fight against "illegal migration". Some of the migrants had apparently been imprisoned in a detention centre for up to 10 months, before the Vietnamese embassy recognised them as citizens and paid for their deportation back to Vietnam. The deportation was declared "voluntary", (i.e. with their agreement in the face of imprisonment and no opportunity to travel to a country of their choice).
Little is known about the number of deportations from non-EU countries such as the Ukraine, nor about human rights concerns in relation to police conduct during their implementation or about the conditions in Ukrainian detention centres. But Ukrainian activists report that conditions in the centres are degrading. Until recently deportations had returned migrants and asylum seekers from the state's borders to "transit countries". This is thought to be one of the first deportations carried out by a Ukrainian airline company (see deportation-alliance.com).
In 1996, the Ukraine started to implement the policies and measures imposed on non-EU countries by the EU in an attempt to thwart migration and flight routes. The same year, the Ukraine announced its closer cooperation with NATO and the EU. Since then Germany, in particular, has started to carry out systematic deportations via Poland to the Ukraine, which represents an important transit country for migrants who want to enter the EU as well as being a country of emigration. Poland rejects migrants who try to enter at the Ukrainian-Polish border, on grounds of corresponding repatriation agreements.
Migrants and asylum seekers from Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Angola, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Cameroon, Turkey, Pakistan, Rwanda, Somalia and Zaire, amongst others, depend on the Ukraine as a transit country. The Ukraine signed the Geneva Refugee Convention at the beginning of this year, but although it passed an asylum law in 1993, the first recognition of asylum seekers was in 1996, in the case of Afghan refugees. Police brutality is well recorded in the Ukraine, in particular against asylum seekers and migrants. The UNHCR and other asylum rights organisations have pointed to the violation of international and EU human rights standards resulting from deportations from the EU (or the imposition of EU migration control measures onto third countries) to the Ukraine or other countries deemed "safe third countries". Human rights standards here refer to rendering the refugee vulnerable to the return to a torturing country of origin, or rendering the migrant vulnerable to return to economic destitution.
Sources
www.noborder.org. See the series of reports published in German in 1996, by the Research Centre for Flight and Migration (http://www.ffm-berlin.de/deutsch/hefte/hefteindex.htm) for details on the situation of migrants and refugees in the Ukraine and Poland. The "domino effect" resulting from the restrictive implementation of EU asylum and migration policies in Eastern Europe and their human rights consequences is also outlined by the German asylum organisation Pro Asyl (http://www.proasyl.
de/lit/litauen/leutha4.htm).