With the help of Rights Georgia, a family from Eritrea seeking asylum wins a case in the Tbilisi City Court

26 April, 2023

With the help of Rights Georgia, a family of four Eritreans seeking asylum in Georgia has won their case against the Migration Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the Tbilisi City Court.

The elder members of the family (mother and father) had to leave Eritrea in the early 1990s when the country entered into an armed conflict with Ethiopia to gain independence. They settled in Saudi Arabia where they continued to live on the basis of a residency permit until 2017, when changes in migration regulations forced them to move to another country. Considering that the situation in Eritrea had not improved the family members decided to come to Georgia, where they applied for international protection in November 2017, though the process turned into a 5-year legal dispute.

Given that Eritrea has been a repressive one-man dictatorship since independence in 1993, under which the population is subject to forced labor, the Migration Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia considered that the Eritrean family met the conditions for granting humanitarian status. However, due to the negative recommendation of the State Security Service, they were denied asylum in March 2018.

The family appealed this decision to the Tbilisi City Court, which considered that the Migration Department of the Ministry of Interior had not properly assessed the risk of persecution of the Eritrean family in the country of origin, the risk of loss of life and the violation of fundamental rights, and therefore ordered the Migration Department to re-examine the case. This decision was upheld by the Court of Appeals as well. Despite the abovementioned, the Migration Department delivered a negative decision after the second consideration of the circumstances.

Precisely this decision was appealed to the Tbilisi City Court where, due to the efforts of Nino Khetsadze, a lawyer from Rights Georgia, the Court granted the complaint in April 2023, and ordered the Migration Department to grant the family humanitarian status.

Rights Georgia provides free legal assistance to the family under the UNHCR-funded project "Protecting and Empowering Refugees, Asylum Seekers, Humanitarian Status Holders, and Stateless Persons in Georgia".

Rights Georgia will continue legal representation of the Eritreans until the issue is finally decided.