New refugee law brings restrictions for asylum-seekers

Amendments to Kyrgyzstan’s refugee law will put new restrictions on asylum-seekers, who will now have to remain in designated areas in the country, although it remains unclear if the government has facilities to house them. "We have had a definition of person who is a refugee in our law on refugees. However, this concept covered two categories - both registered refugees and those who are seeking refugee status," Lunara Joldosheva, a legal consultant at the Kyrgyz parliament, said from the capital, Bishkek, on Wednesday. Under the amended law an asylum-seeker has a legal definition. However, asylum-seekers will not enjoy the right to choose their place of residence as was the case before. "Only registered refugees will have that right in the country," Joldosheva, who worked on the amendments to the country's refugee law, explained. Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiev signed in the new law on 13 May approving the amendments. According to Kyrgyz legislation, the government should provide shelter or special facilities where asylum-seekers could stay pending their case procedure. "However, I do not think the authorities have such a facility or resources for that," Joldosheva maintained. The migration agency has registered some 25 new Uzbek asylum-seekers over the past few months. The majority of them live mainly in the southern city of Osh and adjacent Kara-Suu district, with some of them residing in the neighbouring province of Jalal-Abad. The most recent influx of asylum-seekers to Kyrgyzstan happened one year ago. A group of several hundred Uzbeks fleeing the Uzbek government's violent clampdown on dissent in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan crossed to Kyrgyzstan in mid-May 2005. Around 440 of them were granted the status of office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)-mandated refugees and airlifted in July to Romania for third-country resettlement despite pressure from Tashkent to extradite them. Following their departure, some local NGOs claimed that there might be hundreds of Uzbek nationals in southern Kyrgyzstan who were unwilling to go back to Uzbekistan but had not reported to the authorities. But migrations officials doubted those figures, saying that only a few individuals had approached them to register recently.