With the help of Rights Georgia, an Eritrean citizen was granted humanitarian status

13 June, 2023

With the help of Rights Georgia, a 25-year-old Eritrean citizen, F.F.H.M., was granted humanitarian status in Georgia.

F.F.H.M. was born in 1998 in Saudi Arabia, where he lived for many years. In Eritrea, his country of origin, where he last traveled when he was 12 years old, life was impossible as basic human rights are not protected in the country and the population is subjected to massive forced labor, including lifelong military service, which poses a serious threat to human life and health.

F.F.H.M. was forced to look for a safe place to live in another country a few years ago, when the migration laws in Saudi Arabia changed. He arrived in Georgia, where he applied for asylum.

On December 23, 2021, the Migration Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia refused to grant him asylum on the basis of the recommendation of the State Security Service, according to which the presence of F.F.H.M. in Georgia would pose a threat to the state security of the country.

With the involvement of Rights Georgia, the decision of the Migration Department was appealed to the Tbilisi City Court, which by the decision of April 15, 2022, granted humanitarian status to F.F.H.M. The Migration Department of the MIA appealed the decision of the first instance court to a higher instance, and finally, on June 8, 2023, the Tbilisi Court of Appeals rejected the appeal of the Migration Department of the MIA and upheld the decision of the Tbilisi City Court.

Legal interests of F.F.H.M. were represented in both instances of the courts by the lawyer of Rights Georgia, Rusudan Mchedlishvili.

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