Fuente : Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN)
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Kenya: Thousands of immigrants in rush to register

/noticias.info/ NAIROBI, 23 Jun 2005 (IRIN) - Thousands of people believed to be asylum-seekers or illegal immigrants have flocked to register at the offices of the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, in a bid to avoid deportation, a spokesman said on Thursday.

In early April, the Kenyan minister in charge of immigration, Linah Kilimo, gave illegal immigrants until 30 June to obtain proper residency documents or face deportation.

"Yesterday we had 4,000 to 5,000 Ethiopians who came seeking registration, but we did not have the capacity to interview them all so we just took their photos and their nationalities and issued them with papers to show that they had approached us," Emmanuel Nyabera, UNHCR spokesman said.

He said that those who were issued with papers showing that they intended to seek registration with UNHCR would have to come back to the agency at a later date for an interview to determine whether they would be granted refugee status.

UNHCR, Nyabera added, was talking to the government to make sure that legitimate asylum-seekers did not suffer in Kenya’s process of trying to get rid of illegal immigrants.

"Our concern is that genuine asylum-seekers will suffer, and we have had a series of meetings [with Kenyan authorities] seeking clarification to ensure that the process is carried out in a dignified manner," Nyabera said.

An extension of the registration deadline, he added, might become necessary to give UNHCR enough time to determine who was entitled to refugee status and who was not.

Nyabera said those who had been flocking to UNHCR offices could be either illegal immigrants, genuine asylum-seekers whose registration documents had expired or those who have never sought registration.

Before the Kenyan government’s directive for immigrants to register, UNHCR used to process documents for 1,100 refugee families a month on average. That figure had already jumped to 1,400 families early this month, before the sudden rush to UNHCR offices this week.

By mid-Thursday, Nyabera added, 400 asylum-seekers from Burundi, the DR Congo and Rwanda had turned up at the UNHCR offices. Before the Kenyan order for all foreigners to register, the agency handled about 100 cases from those countries each day.

The government has repeatedly blamed the high violent-crime rate in Kenya on the presence of many illegal immigrants, most of whom it said came from neighbouring countries where guns could be obtained easily because of ongoing or past conflicts.

Kenya has an encampment policy for refugees, which requires that registered asylum-seekers live in designated refugee camps. It has two such camps - Dadaab in the east, near the Somali border, and Kakuma in the northwest, not far from the border with Sudan.

The country hosts a total of 240,000 refugees, the majority of whom come from Somalia and Sudan, according to UNHCR figures.

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