To mark World Refugee Day on June 20, the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee (BHC) published its 2014 Annual Monitoring Report on Refugee Status Determination Procedures.

Three major issues

Improvements are needed mainly in three areas. First of all, BHC calls for ensuring a rapid and efficient access to refugee status determination procedures in the territorial divisions of the State Agency for Refugees (SAR).

Secondly, Bulgaria needs to ensure the provision of quality legal aid to asylum seekers during the status determination procedure. A third major problem in 2014 was the lack of safeguards for the protection of unaccompanied asylum seeking children’s rights.

The main practice, compromising the rights of those children, allows them to enter legal proceedings without ensuring that a legal guardian is assigned.

Findings

Access to territory

In 2014, asylum applications were submitted by 8,205 people, which constitutes a 35 percent increase from last year. The increase is due to the ongoing civil war in Syria and the emerging conflicts in Iraq and other countries in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. The top country of origin was Syria, followed by Afghanistan.

In 2014, altogether 1,250 border officers and 1,350 regular policemen remained dispatched along the Bulgarian-Turkish border. The Ministry of Interior reported that 6,400 third-country nationals had been officially refused access to the national territory in 2014 and returned, mainly to Turkey.

The profile of third-country nationals entering or attempting to enter Bulgaria consists, for the most part, of persons fleeing conflict zones, insecurity or large-scale indiscriminate violations of human rights.

Unaccompanied children

In 2014, 940 unaccompanied children lodged applications for international protection in Bulgaria, which is an increase by 80 percent compared to 2013. As in previous years, the most serious concern in terms of the asylum procedure with unaccompanied children in 2014 remains the absence of safeguards for the protection of their rights — the failure to ensure that a legal guardian is assigned in conformity with the imperative legal requirements.

All of SAR’s procedures with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children were conducted only in the presence of a social worker. It has also been established that the attending social workers do not deliver on their duty to act in the child’s best interest, as they fail to provide any real assistance, and do not interfere, where needed, in the process of interviewing the child; in other words, their involvement in the proceedings is entirely formal.

Unaccompanied asylum seeking children were not provided with legal aid at the administrative stage: in 100 percent of the SAR procedures that were monitored, unaccompanied children did not have a lawyer as their legal representative.

No integration program

As the National Integration Program (NIP) of 2013 came to an end in December 2013, Bulgaria did not adopt or implement a new integration program in 2014.

In early July 2014, the government of Bulgaria adopted the Strategy on the Integration of Beneficiaries of International Protection in the Republic of Bulgaria (2014-2020). The strategy, however, lacked a program and the required financial resources, and hence, Bulgaria did not implement a refugee integration program in 2014.

The complete lack of any integration support in 2014 prevented newly recognized refugees and persons granted protection from accessing a number of fundamental civil and social rights.

The full report is available here.