NGOs Mark the International Day of the Refugees: Additional Efforts Needed

21 June 2006

Starting in 2000, the UN decision established the June 20 as the International Day of the Refugees. On the occasion of the International Day of the Refugees, the Serb Democratic Forum (SDF) and the Centre for Peace Studies (CMS) came out with a public warning about the discrimination and weak solutions for problems faced by returnees and asylum seekers in Croatia.

According to the SDF, over the past several years, the Croatian Government invested significant effort to secure a more humane and just treatment of refugees and used the Road Map (based on the Sarajevo Declaration) to implement quality instruments for solution of refugee issues. Still, refugees and returnees in Croatia still face numerous problems: many of them can�t realize their basic right to home and housing or can�t regulate their citizenship, labour status or retirement insurance.

Furthermore, SDF states that the Constitutional Law on the Rights of National Minorities is hard to implement, especially in the segment of representation of minorities in state administration and the judiciary. Finally, the security situation has deteriorated significantly over the last year, with rising number of ethnically motivated attacks on the returnees.

Such developments, concludes SDF, have direct impact on the return of refugees and their inclusion in the society. Therefore, Croatia has to invest additional efforts to secure that everybody that wishes to return can have all the necessary conditions to do so.

The CMS emphasizes that the return of refugees from the war of the early 1990s has ceased to be a �burning issue� and that more attention is being paid to asylum seekers. However, frequently there is confusion between the status and identity of asylum seekers and illegal migrants, criminals and �those that come to steal our jobs�. Such discriminatory elements can be reduced to the minimum through education and raised sensibility of the general population.

CMS adds that, three years after the entry into force of the Law on Asylum and 600 submitted requests later, not a single asylum application has been approved. Simultaneously, a review of the Law is announced, with planned introduction of the institute of �temporary protection�.

�The introduction of such an instrument could fully eliminate the institution of asylum and prevent the further development of integration policies directed at the asylum seekers, policies which are the key for achievement of social inclusion of marginal groups�, warns CMS.