Somalians attacked in Ukraine's Accomodation Centre

The Ukrainian authorities should immediately stop police harassment and threats against Somali asylum seekers held at the Zhuravychi Migrant Accommodation Centre, Human Rights Watch said today. In a letter sent to the Ukrainian authorities, Human Rights Watch also called for the immediate release of all Somali asylum seekers who are being held in administrative detention pending deportation. According to information from representatives of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Ukraine, 125 Somali nationals are being held at the Zhuravychi Migrant Accommodation Centre (MAC) in the Volyn region in north-western Ukraine. Around 80 have told UNHCR they want to apply for asylum in Ukraine, but have not been allowed to do so, and some have been on hunger strike in response. “Somali nationals who flee from violence and persecution in their own country are already extremely vulnerable,” said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. The Somalis are among tens of thousands of asylum seekers and migrants in Ukraine, many of whom are attempting to eventually cross the border to the European Union. Last January 30, the situation at the MAC deteriorated, as a group of approximately 21 police officers, masked and armed with batons and tear gas, came to the centre, searched detainees’ rooms and confiscated some of their personal belongings, the HRW quoted one of the hunger strikers as saying.  “They beat some of the boys and kicked them with heavy boots. They were shouting, but we could not understand them because they spoke Russian. Only two guys in our group speak Russian so they translated for us. The police officers were threatening to kill us if we don’t go to the dining room and start eating,” he said. A Human Rights Watch report from December, 2010, “Buffeted in the Borderland: The Treatment of Migrants and Asylum Seekers in Ukraine”, documented that migration detention in Ukraine is often arbitrary and detainees do not enjoy reliable access to a judge or other authority, or access to legal representation to challenge their detention. Somali nationals are very rarely granted asylum status in Ukraine, and they appear to face a vicious cycle of repeat detention while in Ukraine. Human Rights Watch spoke with three members of the group of hunger strikers who are being held at the Zhuravychi MAC. They said the majority of the group had been repeatedly arrested and detained over the past year or more. They also said that some members of the group were at different stages of appealing rejections of their asylum applications by the State Migration Service. Others had been detained before they had been allowed to lodge their appeals or said that no action had been taken on claims filed while in detention, leading them to believe that the authorities had not actually accepted their applications for asylum or their appeals. A 21-year-old Somali detainee told Human Rights Watch that he wanted to appeal the State Migration Service’s rejection of his asylum application as manifestly unfounded or abusive, but that, days later, the police arrested and detained him on suspicion of being unlawfully in Ukraine, and that he was not able to appeal the rejection of his claim. He was then transferred to the Zhuravychi MAC for a 12-month administrative detention sentence. “We came here to save our lives, not be treated like criminals” he told Human Rights Watch. “There is a war in my country. But here we have no medical assistance, we can’t rent a flat, we can’t even go outside because we get arrested. We escaped from one prison only to come to another one.” In the letter sent to the Ukrainian authorities, Human Rights Watch called for the immediate release of all Somali asylum seekers who are being held in administrative detention pending deportation and urged the government to utilize a new law on complementary protection by providing this protection to Somalis who do not qualify for asylum under the 1951 Refugee Convention but who cannot be returned to Somalia because of ongoing armed conflict and generalised violence in that country.