For many Palestinians in Gaza, crossing the Rafah Border Gate into Egypt has been a lifeline for months. [Getty]
Egypt’s new law on asylum-seekers has come under fire by civil society groups for failing to take the views of stakeholders and Egypt’s international partners into consideration.
The law, Egypt’s latest bid to create a legal framework for its growing asylum-seekers population, was finally approved by the Egyptian parliament on 19 November.
It establishes a new body that will rule into applications for refugee status by asylum-seekers.
To be called the Permanent Refugee Affairs Commission, the new body will be supervised by the Egyptian prime minister and made up of representatives of different state institutions.
The formation of this new body is viewed as the most noteworthy merit of the law by some MPs, for putting the issue of granting refugee status to asylum-seekers into Egyptian hands. However, this will pit the new body against the United Nations refugee agency, which has dealt with asylum cases in Egypt.
Legal framework
The new commission will rule into applications submitted to it by legal aliens within six months and illegal ones within a year, according to new the law.
It will give priority to applications submitted by disabled persons, the elderly, pregnant women, children unaccompanied by their guardians and the victims of human trafficking, torture and sexual abuse.
The new law makes it necessary for asylum-seekers to submit applications for refugee status within 45 days from arrival.
It says asylum-seekers who fail to submit an application for refugee status within the specified period risk being jailed or fined.
In the light of the law, those denied refugee status will have to leave Egypt for another country.
Legislators say it comes to solve a problem that has emerged with the growth of Egypt’s population of asylum-seekers: addressing the illegal status of millions of aliens who live in the country.
“It creates a mechanism for dealing with the status of asylum-seekers, for the first time,” MP Ahmed al-Aqati told The New Arab.
“It does this to ensure that all the foreigners living in our country will be visible to state institutions, which will help these institutions to offer them the services they need and also protect Egyptian national security,” he added.
Scepticism
Nevertheless, a group of 22 civil society organisations criticised the law for failing to enlist the views of stakeholders, Egypt’s international partners and civil society organisations working on asylum-seekers’ and refugees’ issues.
Having called the policies regulating the formulation of the law ‘exclusionary‘, the same organisations said it lacked clear criteria for the selection, training and capacity-building of the staff of the proposed refugees’ commission.
They added in a statement that the same law also lacks clear criteria on the procedures that govern the work of the commission, specifically in making decisions on asylum protection.
This raises concern, they said, about the compatibility of the modalities that will ultimately govern the commission’s work criteria.
“The failure to include provisions outlining standards and modalities could potentially result in a reduction of protection levels available to refugee populations in Egypt,” they added.
They called for a transitional period, during which the Egyptian government has to work in parallel with the United Nations Refugee Agency on the road to creating the infrastructure and capacities needed to carry out the task of dealing with asylum-seekers in a manner consistent with legal and humanitarian obligations.
The same organisations also expressed concern about the independence of the proposed commission, especially with the government controlling and financing this commission.
Dramatic surge
The new law comes as Egypt stands at the receiving end of a huge number of asylum-seekers, especially from regional states boiling with conflict.
It also comes as Egypt anticipates a stampede of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, with Israel escalating its attacks against different parts of the strip, making them uninhabitable, and squeezing Gaza’s population in its southern region close to the Egyptian border.
The Arab country’s asylum-seekers’ population grew noticeably after the civil war in neighbouring Sudan erupted in April last year.
Even before this, Egypt hosted millions of refugees from a long list of states, including Syria; South Sudan; Eritrea, and Ethiopia.
Egypt now hosts 9 million asylum-seekers who make up 8 percent of the population of 106 million, according to the government.
Only 792,783, however, are registered with the United Nations Refugee Agency until October of this year.
Egypt’s new bid to address the illegal status of its growing asylum-seekers’ population also comes with this population falling, especially since the eruption of the series of popular uprisings that swept through the Arab region as of late 2010, opening the door for massive migration from the region to Europe, at the centre of relations between Egypt and the continent.
On the European side of the Mediterranean, Egypt is viewed as an important buffer against the flow of migrants from Africa and the Arab region.
Among many other considerations, this tempts Europe to court Cairo and pledge billions of dollars in aid and for economic cooperation and investment ventures.
Sick and tired
Egypt does not force those seeking asylum in it to live in shelters or camps, but allows them to live within its cities, where they share this country’s limited resources with its citizens and rub shoulders with them to receive the poorly-funded services it offers.
Over the years, these foreigners formed their own communities, turning some parts of Egypt into colonies or miniatures of their native countries.
Against all odds, some of the refugees and asylum-seekers have made their own economic and investment success stories, adding value to the national economy and enriching the Egyptian culture, especially its culinary one.
The Syrians, in particular, are taking over the Egyptian market, invading trades that used to be the Egyptians’ preserve.
But this is exactly why the same foreigners are burning up some Egyptians, who accuse them of taking their own jobs and making life hard for them.
The same people blame the refugees and asylum-seekers for increasing demand for housing and commodities, contributing to the current sharp rise in their prices.
This view is not limited to people on the streets, but is also common among some of Egypt’s lawmakers, who cite the effect of the presence of these 9 million refugees and asylum-seekers on housing prices in Egypt.
This is also why final approval by the parliament of the new law increases people’s anger, threatening to have a political backlash for the government and the legislature.
Some people have described the government as a ‘bunch of traitors‘ for striving to solve the problems of asylum-seekers and refugees and turning a blind eye to the problems of Egyptians.
Other people have launched social media campaigns against the new law, while a third group of others has called for not re-electing MPs who had approved the law.
Sayed Mahmud, a civil servant from Egyptian capital Cairo, said he would not forgive the lawmakers who had approved the law.
Such a law, he said, does more harm than good.
“The refugees have increased burdens on Egyptians by standing behind the rise in the price of everything, from housing, to food and transport,” Mahmud, a father of four in his early fifties, told TNA.
“Legalising these people’s presence in our country will mean that they are here to stay for long, which will make the problem even worse,” he added.
