Migrating to Nowhere Land

I cannot help it.  Given where we were today, I have to get technical. For those of you who don't care about that, I have put in a pictures of a cathedral near where we had lunch.  By the way, we ate lunch at a Colombian restaurant, which was pretty good.  

We have heard from the UNHCR and others that as of late about 1,500 Colombians are claiming asylum in Ecuador every month.  That high number, which does not include the Colombians who enter and do not claim asylum, indicates that there is still a clear safety concern in Colombia and that it continues to increase.

Before we came here, we heard that life for Colombians in Ecuador was generally not good because of discrimination.  Today the focus was on the legal challenges of Colombians who try and claim asylum in Ecuador.  Our first stop this morning was at an organization called Asylum Access Ecuador.  We met with the director and the coordinator of legal services who explained legal frame work that Colombian asylum seekers face and the changing landscape of this.

The coordinator of legal services began his talk with us by saying, “We are in nowhere land.”  He was referring to challenges with the changing legal definitions for asylum that the Ecuadorian government is implementing, but it seemed like a good description of the plight of Colombians who try and come to Ecuador in search of security.  They often get nowhere. 

The most significant change this year is that a preliminary screening when a person first makes an asylum request has been added to the process.  Their first step now is an assessment of “admissibility.”  Basically that means in a short ten to fifteen minute interview a government official will see if they meet the basic definition of a convention refugee  (for you policy geeks out there, they also apply the Cartagena Declaration on Refugees to their assessment). 

About 26% do not pass that test and are either turned away from entry or are told to apply for some other visa such as a tourist visa.  The next step is to get a full Refugee Status Determination (RSD) from a judicial committee.  We were told that last year, about 70% of applicants were given asylum.  However, recently there has been an extreme drop off on asylum being granted.  As of this year, we were told by the Asylum Access staff only about 10% of applicants are getting asylum.

There seems to be something wrong here.  There are more Colombians crossing the border these days, and their life is very harsh, both in urban and rural areas.  Given what we have been hearing, it seems highly unlikely that these people would be migrating for economic reasons.  Ecuador is for the most part a poorer country with seemly fewer opportunities and there is a high level of discrimination against Colombians.  It is hard to imagine these people coming here for reasons other than asylum. 

It appears that this limiting of access to asylum and Refugee Status Determination (RSD) mechanisms is a disturbing trend, not just here, but perhaps in Canada given recently tabled legislation.  I have wondered today if given that the 1951 Convention is fairly well defined, a more effective way to limit access to it is to put up barriers to access to the mechanism, by either trying to keep potential asylum seekers out physically, or raising the bar to get to the mechanism to RSD.  There also seems to be attempts in the region to depoliticize the conflict.  If the perpetrators of threats or violence are considered “armed groups” and not political groups, then people crossing borders because of the threat of violence are not really convention refugees.

After meeting with Asylum Access, we were able to meet with the Ecuadorian National Coordinator of Refugees.   He was able to confirm the information that we got from Asylum Access.  While he expressed the governments concern for asylum seeker and their desire to make sure that asylum seeker received services from the government, he also said that the trend was fewer Colombians were getting asylum in Ecuador.

The MCC delegation at the UNHCR Ecuador office.  Brian Dyck, Ed Wiebe, Orlando Vasquez, Jennifer Chappell-Deckert and Bonnie Klassen.

After a lunch we closed out our meetings with the very amicable staff at the UNHCR to follow up on some discussion.  Remarkably we found out that one of the staff there had just come back from working with the UNHCR in Damascus, and she was very aware of MCC’s work with the Palestinian refugees who had fled Iraq and were living in the Al Hol camp in Syria.  We were able to get a few updates on that situation.

We talked mostly about possibilities of how MCC could be involved in resettlement of refugees to Canada from Ecuador or helping provide support to Colombian refugees in Ecuador.  We left agreeing to stay in contact.

Tomorrow we will have our last day in Ecuador.  We plan to tie up a few loose ends with the church here and from there we are back in Bogota for about 24 hours and then back to Canada just in time for Thanksgiving.