U.S. Committee for Refugees World Refugee Survey 1997 - Ukraine
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Date:
1 January 1997
According to the Ukrainian government, more than 5,000 people from Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries applied for refugee status during 1995-96 (figures for 1996 alone were not available). In addition, UNHCR estimated that between 3,000 and 4,000 asylum seekers from outside the CIS lived in Ukraine at the end of 1996. During the year, the Ukrainian government implemented its 1993 Law on Refugees and began making refugee status determinations. By year's end, the government had granted refugee status to 1,161 persons. Of these, the overwhelming majority (999 persons) were from Afghanistan. Although government statistics on recognition rates were not available, UNHCR estimated that between 40 and 50 percent of cases processed were accepted for refugee status. According to UNHCR's Kiev office, Ukrainian authorities were processing the most vulnerable and clear cases first many of them Afghans associated with Afghanistan's ousted Najibullah regime. As a result, the recognition rate was expected to decline. Refugees from the conflicts in Chechnya and Abkhazia, numbering 1,834 and 775, respectively, benefitted from special emergency decrees facilitating assistance to these groups. Crimean Peninsula The Department of Migration in Crimea reported that 4,619 persons had been registered as "persons in refugee-like situations." These people originated primarily from conflict areas in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and the Abkhazia region of Georgia. Of the survivors and descendants of the Tatars deported from the Crimea to Central Asia during the Stalin era, an estimated 260,000 had returned by 1996. The rate at which Tatars were returning sharply declined due to poor economic conditions, which have made the cost of relocating and establishing new homes prohibitive. An estimated 60,000 (according to the government) to 120,000 (according to Crimean Tatar sources) Tatars have not yet received Ukrainian citizenship. Many are stateless or in danger of becoming so because under citizenship laws in Uzbekistan (from where most Tatars are returning), individuals living abroad for more than five years forfeit their citizenship. Emigration During U.S. fiscal year 1996, the United States admitted as refugees 13,241 former Soviet citizens from the Ukraine approximately 45 percent of the 29,536 admitted from throughout the former Soviet Union during this period. Members of certain category groups designated in 1989 have been eligible for admission to the United States as refugees if they assert a credible fear of persecution, a more liberal standard than the normal "well-founded fear of persecution" standard. The categories Jews, Evangelical Christians, Ukrainian Catholics, and Ukrainian Orthodox were chosen because of historical patterns of persecution directed at their members in the former Soviet Union.
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