France’s Council of State, the country’s top administrative court, has ruled that non-Ukrainian foreigners leaving Ukraine are not eligible for the same refugee protection in France as Ukrainian nationals.
The Council of State validated a prior move by French authorities that saw non-Ukrainian nationals who left Ukraine refused the same temporary protection that had been granted to Ukrainian nationals, given they could simply go back to their home countries.
Several non-governmental organizations (NGOs) had complained that migrants who had resided in Ukraine would not be able to qualify for the six-month renewable protection offered to Ukrainians by the French government, Europe1 reports.
The French Coordination for the Right of Asylum, a group of pro-migration associations, commented on the issue in June, stating their concern for foreigners who had been either working or studying in Ukraine at the time the conflict broke out.
“After a tolerated stay of one month, if they have not made an asylum request — a request whose fate is uncertain — these people begin to receive obligations to leave French territory,” the group complained, as if this was in some way unreasonable.
The case was brought to the top French court after Armenians who had settled in Ukraine and later fled the conflict applied for temporary status instead of returning to Armenia.
"[T]oday a third of the refugees who pass through Ukraine who do not come from Ukraine, but… come from sub-Saharan Africa in particular… who use this new migratory route to come to Europe," the French MEP alleged https://t.co/1POeNpm87Z
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) March 13, 2022
One woman applied for temporary protection and was refused by local authorities in April but was granted a one-month residency permit. The authority’s decision was later rejected by a judge, which prompted the French Interior Ministry to refer the case to the Council of State for a ruling.
The court stated that France could extend temporary protection for third-country nationals leaving Ukraine but that the government would have to adopt a specific decree, and that since no decree has been given, the authority was justified in not granting temporary protection to the Armenian woman.
According to the French parliament, France has taken in over 106,000 people from Ukraine from the start of the war in February until the end of September.
Since the early days of the conflict, some have expressed concern that third-country migrants may be exploiting Ukraine to enter the European Union illegally, claiming to have fled the war.
Nicolas Bay, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the populist Reconquest party, suggested that many claiming to be from Ukraine were not, saying: “[T]oday a third of the refugees who pass through Ukraine who do not come from Ukraine, but… come from sub-Saharan Africa in particular… [they] use this new migratory route to come to Europe.”
A video of an Irish "citizen journalist" questioning a number of South Asian men claiming to be 60-year-old Ukrainian refugees has gone viral, with the footage prompting questions about the people being given asylum in Western Europe https://t.co/OF5fuS0Qwq
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) March 27, 2022
Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com.
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