Vital information for anyone seeking asylum or thinking of leaving home. Please read. I dont know of any major refugee agency thats actually helping people to escape Uganda.If I were one of the refugee agencies with an office in Uganda, and somebody came to me with a truly desperate situation, I would probably recommend Kenya as the quickest, easiest place to go, but ethically I dont think any serious refugee professional urges flight across borders casually. You always need to explain to people the multiple and horrible problems they will face. Its not something people should undertake if theres any chance of getting by with reasonable safety where they are. Obviously if folks make it to Kenya the agencies try to assist them there. The reason they go to Kenya is that theres a UNHCR office, mainly. They are not prepared for how expensive it is, how much resentment there is against refugees there (whether theyre LGBT or not) and how little institutional support they get -- especially how completely unprepared the Kenyan LGBT movement is to provide any assistance to them. (They have neither time nor resources.) I just did a quick search online and noticed that the average waiting period for RSD (refugee status determination) at UNHCR Kenya was two years as of 2010 (refintl.org/.../somalis-kenya-invest-long-term). Probably its longer now. They will get almost no financial assistance from UNCHR until they get a positive RSD (after which they will face another long wait for resettlement). I doubt Melanie even knows these figures, or knows what RSD is. She promises these guys that shell support them in Kenya, but she doesnt tell them that theyll be there for 2+ years and that she has money enough for two weeks. Thats one of the places where the problems start. Somalis in Kenya: Invest in the Long-Term | Refugees International refintl.org Policy recommendations In 2011, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees,António Gu... I know at least a little bit about refugee/asylum issues. Just to clarify :when you arrive in a second country and register with UNHCR, they give you a date for an interview. The interview is the main basis on which they decide whether to recognize you as a refugee or not. Here in Egypt, which has one of the slowest UNHCR offices in the world, I know of Syrians who arrived this year and were given an INTERVIEW DATE in 2017. UNHCR Kenya isnt as bad as that, but its slow. After the interview, you wait again to get RSD -- the UNHCR decision on whether you qualify as a refugee or not. If they decide you do, you are eligible for resettlement, but they have to shop your file around from embassy to embassy till they find a country that is willing to take you. That can also take years. There are Sudanese in Egypt who have been here waiting for resettlement since the last century. There are some cases where we were able to get expedited processing from UNHCR for particular classes of people -- notably LGBT Iraqis in Lebanon and Syria in 2009-2010, because the second country environment was also homophobic and unsafe. But that depended ENTIRELY on there being countries willing to take them. Without a commitment from Norway, Sweden, and the US to expedite acceptance of those people, there was little UNHCR could have done. I am not defending UNHCR, which is a terrible bureaucracy. I loathe them here in Egypt. BUt you also have to recognize that they have no legal authority in any country beyond what theyve negotiated in an agreement with the host country. So they have no power to protect people in Kenya. All they can do is complain to the Kenyan authorities if somebody is mistreated, and its up to those authorities whether they pay attention. If the Kenyan government decides it wants to put refugees in camps, there is very little UNHCR can do. In Turkey, the government regularly put LGBT Iranians (along with other Iranians) in small towns in the conservative eastern part of the country, where they were harassed all the time. Some of them begged for camps, because at least they would be isolated from the local Turkish public. UNHCR was sympathetic but completely powerless to change the Turkish governments policy. Similarly, UNHCR can do little to protect people from police harassment. In Egypt, because the waiting time for RSD is so long, UNHCR gives people on the waiting list yellow cards (as opposed to the blue card you get if you are actually declared a refugee) that are supposed to give them some semblance of a status. But the Egyptian police ignore these, pick refugee claimants up in raids or at checkpoints and jail them for being sans-papiers, and in some cases deport them in violation of the Refugee Convention. I wish UNHCR here yelled louder in protest, but realistically yelling is all they could do.
Posted on: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 02:14:26 +0000
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