Seeking Asylum: Legal Situation

Seeking Asylum: Legal Situation

If you are not from Europe and you want to apply for asylum in Turkey, you can only apply with the UNHCR, but you also have to register with the turkish police.

- If you come into the country with the officially necessary documentation, like passport or visa, (“legally”), then you go to the police in the place you staying, when you decide to seek asylum.

- If you have no papers and you want to seek asylum, you must apply at the nearest place to where you enter Turkey. There are only two UNHCR offices one in Van and one in Ankara. If you come through Van, you have to apply in Van. If you come through a different region, you have to apply in Ankara. However if the police catches you on the way, the police (1) might not believe you want to apply for asylum and try to deport you immediately or (2) they will send you back to Van and you have to apply there.

Procedure:

Generally everyone goes to register with the UNHCR first, but you also have to register with the police. Officially the police have to give you the permission to apply with the UNHCR. The police will interview you about on your reasons and decide to give you permission to apply with the UNHCR or not. In reality they don’t give you a paper of anything, but they can try to prevent you from apply with the UNHCR. If you go to the police by yourself they generally let you apply with the UNHCR (only if they catch you without papers on your way through Turkey, then they will probably deny you the right to apply for asylum, more about this see: detention). According to international law, the police must give you permission to apply with the UNHCR, but often they try to impede this if they catch you without papers.

Then you get a “living permit” (Ikamet) from the police. This costs around 306 TL per person (also children) and is only for 6 months. You will have to extend this “living permit” every six months as long as you are in the process of asylum or resettlement with the UNHCR. (This can take very long.)

After that the police will probably send you to a different city, they call “satellite city””. There are 52 satellite cities. They are all fairly small cities. The big cities Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir are NOT one of them. Unfortunately, officially you are forced to live there.

Application Process

Around 6 -12 months later the UNHCR will call you for an interview to explain your reasons to be accepted as a refugee.

! Note: the UNHCR (and the Turkish Police) - like most EU-countries - have a very narrow idea of what a refugee is. This is when you can prove to the UNHCR that you can’t return to your country because you fear prosecution because of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. They do not accept economic reasons. If you say you are looking for a better life, they will most probably reject your application. So be careful what you say!

The UNHCR will first decide about your application for asylum (that can take another two years or so) and then, if positive, try to resettle you to a different country (like the USA, Canada, or Norway).

Resettlement

This resettlement process can take very long or be impossible. A lot of people do not get resettled at all.
The UNHCR very rarely tells the applicants how long their application will take. (Some people are known to have waited 6 years).

The UNHCR in Turkey resettles about 5000 people out of about 10 000 applications per year. Important criteria are if you are elderly, women, children, ill, if you have family in the respective resettlement country or have suffered violence or torture. It is also known that the Turkish Government obstructs the resettlement of recognized refugees. For example, recently the Turkish government has ordered the UNHCR not to resettle people from Afghanistan!

Rejection of Your Application

If the UNHCR rejects your application, you should normally appeal within 15 days. You have the right to appeal up to three times. The only organisation that can help you appeal against the rejection of your application in Helsinki Citizens Assembly. Contact them for help.

If you don’t appeal, Turkey wants you to leave the country within 15 days, but in practice they usually take a long time to decide about this. Even if you didn’t appeal within those 15 days, it is possible for UNHCR to reopen your case even months later. So it is always good to try. Theoretically you also have the right to go to court, but it is very difficult to do so, generally the court will decide negatively. So you need good support and generally it doesn’t stop a deportation. However Helsinki Citizens Assembly has been successful with court cases at the European Court of Human Rights.

Very often the UNHCR doesn’t give reasons for the rejection. If this is the case, try and get access to these reasons. An organisation like Helsinki Citizens Assembly can help you.