In 1992 the problem became acute in Ukraine when a great number of refugees flooded the country. Since that time over 300 thousand of them have been given the refugee status. About 300 000 of them were Crimean Tatars, and more than 3 thousands came from far abroad. This should not be taken to mean that we have no refugee problem. Until 1996 it was treated in an administrative manner: people applied to the migration services, appealed to the Ministry for Nationalities and Migration (the State Committee for Nationalities and Migration). This was the end of the story - they had to wait for an answer.

In 1996 Ukraine got a constitution which (Art 155) allows to appeal against officials to the court bypassing the State Committee. Anybody seeking the refugee status could either appeal to the State Committee for Nationalities and Migration or go straight to the court. I am proud to say that the Pecherskii district court was the first to recognize a person a refugee, or rather, did not recognize him but annulled a decision of the State Committee for Nationalities and Migration. Regrettably later our decision was annulled.

In Ukraine this duty belongs to those who apply to courts to defend their rights. Naturally enough, the courts have numerous problems of their own. The time limit is too short to be able to properly consider the case-each of them requires detailed preparation and a lot of information. If the applicant runs a risk in his/her country then, more likely than not, they escaped without documents. We are dealing with an undocumented person and we have to decide, on the strength of evidence, whether the person is a refugee or somebody living illegally in Ukraine for a long time. We know that many citizens of Angola, Bangladesh, India, and other countries are living in Ukraine without documents, who came to study and have nowhere to go. There were numerous problems: people had no documents, their applications left much to be desired, they stated facts and offered no evidence, etc. Last summer we gathered officials from the migration services for a seminar, which was also attended by the Union of the Defense Lawyers of Ukraine. It was decided that they should learn how to help these people draw correct applications and gather necessary papers. Sometimes people come to courts with one paper only-their applications with only one sentence “refused on the strength of Art 3.2 of the Law of Ukraine “On Refugees” written across it. No explanations and no details yet, obviously, there had been interviews. All other papers remained in the previous instances and it was very hard to get them. We were not ready, and we are not ready to obtain information about the country of origin; we have to work all together: the border guards, the ministry of the interior and the state committee.

We are using the Internet as a source of information yet we cannot use the services of the security committee or the Foreign Ministry because the information about somebody seeking asylum in Ukraine can reach their countries of origin. There are no witnesses and no relevant documents; more often than not bureaucrats are indifferent. Decision-making is a lengthy process. We have discovered that real refugees are rare among those who come to courts. We mostly deal with those living without documents in Ukraine. I have to mention this in connection with a unique research of how the rights of the refugees and asylum seekers are observed in my country. This was done by the UNHCR office and the Institute of Sociology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. People from 38 countries were polled as well as experts of departments and ministries, and human rights activists. The result proved very interesting: a refugee or an asylum seeker was a young or mature Muslim male, with higher education, unmarried, speaking Russian and having no Ukrainian who had been living in Ukraine for over three years. Can we recognize him a refugee? We have to be very careful with each of the cases. More often than not such people having lived in Russia for some time illegally arrive to Ukraine which is also a springboard. Such people are heading for a wealthy Western country. We have to deal with many of them.