The human rights activist told how the Federal Migration Service of the Russian Federation deceives citizens of Ukraine in order not to give them refugee status

Moscow - Kyiv, June 27 (Navigator, Mikhail Stamm) - Officials of the Russian Federal Migration Service are slipping refugees from Ukraine a temporary asylum application form instead of an application form for refugee recognition. This allows the state to deprive refugees of the right to housing, financial assistance, health insurance and the right to work in Russia. The famous journalist Valery Panyushkin from the Pravonapadenie charitable foundation writes about this in Kommersant.

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Refugees from Kramatorsk contacted “Pravonapadenie”. Four adults, mothers and grandmothers, hired a bus on their own, took ten children, their own and their neighbors’, from under shelling, and settled them in a dacha near Moscow with friends. They have no means of subsistence; volunteers bring them food. But Russia is in no hurry to grant refugee status to the residents of Donbass, and they themselves are in no hurry to achieve this status: they do not want to believe that they have become refugees for a long time.

The Law “On Refugees” Federal Law N4528 dated February 19.02.1993, 1 provides for two ways to settle in Russia people who fled to Russia from the war. These people can be recognized as refugees (Article 12), or they can be granted temporary asylum (Article 90). The difference is that a refugee can count on temporary housing, financial assistance, medical insurance and, most importantly, has the right to legally work in Russia. In other words, a refugee has the same rights as a Russian citizen, only temporarily. And “temporary asylum” is just the right to legally stay on the territory of Russia. A Ukrainian with “temporary asylum” is simply not required to leave Russia every XNUMX days, like an ordinary visitor.

A refugee is recognized as a person who “due to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, citizenship, nationality ... is outside the country of his nationality.” If Russia admits that Russians are being killed in eastern Ukraine, it must, therefore, recognize Russians from eastern Ukraine as refugees.

But our refugees from Kramatorsk, with the help of Law Enforcement lawyer Svetlana Viktorova, who applied to the Moscow department of the Federal Migration Service, were asked to sign a pre-filled application form: “I ask you to consider my application for temporary asylum on the territory of the Russian Federation without the procedure for considering an application for refugee recognition on the territory of the Russian Federation.”

There is some deceit in this, since people, as a rule, are not fully informed about their rights. But this is quite legal, since Art. 12 of the Law “On Refugees” allows refugees to be granted only temporary asylum if they “have grounds for recognition as a refugee, but are limited to an application ... for the opportunity to temporarily stay on the territory of the Russian Federation.”

Refugees from Kramatorsk who contacted us really do not want refugee status, but simply want to temporarily stay on the territory of the Russian Federation. Another thing is that an application for temporary asylum is considered within three months. That is, a citizen of Ukraine who has the right to stay in Russia for only 90 days before being granted temporary asylum will not be able to legally wait for the consideration of his application on the merits. Meanwhile, according to the order of the Federal Migration Service of Russia N352 dated August 19.08.2013, 90, within five days the migration service must review the application and decide whether it accepts it. And if accepted, then provide a certificate stating that the application has been accepted and the date for consideration of the application on its merits has been set. With this certificate, a citizen of Ukraine could legally not leave Russia for more than XNUMX days. And these certificates are not issued by the FMS.

Let us recall that according to the head of the Federal Migration Service, Mr. Romodanovsky, the number of refugees from Ukraine has reached 400 thousand people in Russia, and according to the Speaker of the Federation Council Valentina Matvienko, there are already about 500 thousand refugees.