CEPAD and ACNUR sign agreement with government to attend refugees

Trinidad Vásquez, MANAGUA, Nicaragua, September 4, 2003

The director general of Migration Luis Rodolfo Toruño and the Evangelical Pro Denominational Alliance Council Taxi Heathrow Airport of Churches (CEPAD) and the UN High Commissioner on Refugees (ACNUR) signed an agreement to carry out a project to legalize and document thousands of foreigners who entered Nicaragua in the 1980s.

Negotiations to sign this agreement lasted two years, said CEPAD delegate Blanca Fonseca, who is also the ACNUR representative in Nicaragua. The project contemplates legalizing all refugees that entered Nicaragua in these years, above all Salvadorans and Guatemalans who were fleeing the internal war in their own countries.

There are an estimated 4,000 undocumented refugees in Nicaragua, who remained after the repatriation process that took place in the 1990s. The CEPAD/ACNUR delegate said that there are very few refugees from other countries with the exception of a few Colombians who fled the violence in their countries.

Among other things, ACNUR advises Peruvians and Ecuadorians who are arrested for lacking documents when they are in transit to the United States. This week 17 Peruvians were detained, including a pregnant women and a child. They were turned over to the Peruvian Embassy in Managua for their repatriation.

In the first phase the project will cost US$3,000 funded by ACNUR. Eleven migration officials will work from September 16 to November 15 to update the data of the refugees.

Once there is a list, Migration-ACNUR will publish it in the dailies so that people come forward to legalize their documents. They will be exonerated from any fines.

Once the first phase has been finalized, the goal is to achieve a migratory amnesty for these refugees. Migrations will present the project to the Executive Branch and it will then be discussed in the National Assembly.

CEPAD/ACNUR have been working on this project for two years, in the face of demands from Salvadoran citizens, many of them members of Evangelical Churches, who do not have residency visas.

On the other hand, CEPAD/ACNUR was selected by agencies in the region to represent Central America, Belize and Cuba in a general ACNUR assembly to take place in Geneva from September 24 to October 3 in order to report about the situation of refugees around the world.