Last week published the Report List the story of Atta, a Czech of Afghan descent. He was one of the children who – either with their parents or on their own – forcibly left their homes and fled to Europe. Now the 21-year-old Atta graduated from high school in the Czech Republic, a few years ago he obtained a permanent residence permit and a Czech foreign passport.
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According to Eurostat measurements, obtaining international protection in the Czech Republic is becoming increasingly difficult. 732 applicants from abroad have been granted asylum in the last decade, less than nine percent of them being children under 18 years of age. Atta was one of them. But as the data show, it is rather an exception.
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More than a quarter of asylum applications were from minors
Since 2011, Czech children have been granted Czech asylum. The Czech Republic processed the largest number of positive requests for international assistance during 2015, when officials granted asylum to 15 minors. Last year and eight years ago, no minor refugee was granted asylum.
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The most successful were young asylum seekers last year in Greece, Germany and Belgium. Sweden and the United Kingdom, for example, also have a generous migration policy, but after leaving the European Union they ceased to be included in EU statistics.
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In total, the European Union received 484,980 requests for international assistance last year, less than a third of them from minors.
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The Czechia is also sparse for international protection
According to available data, the Czech Republic is one of the countries in the European Union that grants the least asylum. In Germany, Spain and Slovakia, up to two thirds of applicants succeeded last year, while in the Czech Republic it is not even a tenth.
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According to data from 1999 to 2020, the Czech Republic received 84,729 applications for protection from foreigners from various countries of the world, some of which were submitted repeatedly by people. 2,551 applicants were satisfied.
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Since 2006, the Czech Republic has also provided the possibility of subsidiary protection – unlike asylum, which is for an indefinite period, it lasts one to two years. So far, the Czechia has provided it to 2,547 people. Asylum and subsidiary protection have therefore been granted together to six percent of applicants since 1999.
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Most applications for international protection were registered in 2001, and since 2003 their number has been gradually declining. There was no significant increase in 2015, when there was a major migration crisis in Europe. Altogether, 1,255,640 people applied for asylum in the European Union at that time. This was more than double the increase in 2014, when 626,000 people applied for asylum across the EU.
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Among the applicants for international protection in the Czech Republic last year were mainly people from Ukraine, Georgia and Vietnam. Minors were most often registered by the authorities in Ukrainian, Belarusian, Azerbaijani and Syrian applications.
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At the end of last year, a total of 958 people lived in the Czech Republic with asylum status. The most frequent were from Myanmar, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.
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Complementary protection was granted to 964 applicants, more than a third of whom were from Syria.
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Afghans in the Czech Republic
In connection with the current situation in Afghanistan, where the radical Taliban movement came to power again after twenty years, the Czechia, together with the European Union, expects a new wave of migrants.
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According to the data of the Ministry of the Interior of the Czech Republic, in the last ten years, Afghan applicants in the Czech Republic submitted 1.5 percent of all applications and obtained approximately three percent of granted asylums.
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More than three hundred Afghans who work, do business or study here also live in the Czech Republic with a residence permit. At the end of July this year, 84 people from Afghanistan had a temporary residence permit and 244 people could live permanently in the Czech Republic.
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From 2011 to the previous year, 46 people from Afghanistan acquired Czech citizenship: 34 of them originally had asylum here and 12 stayed in the Czech Republic for a long time with a residence permit. It is possible to apply for citizenship after five years of living in the Czech Republic.
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