Non-governmental organisations are the primary bodies that offer protection and assistance to refugees and asylum seekers in real terms. In societies where refugees and asylum seekers have insufficient legal protection and where they often become targets for harassment and violence, non-governmental organisations play a key role in speaking out in defence of their rights, and also in the development of a stable and civil society. Over the last two years, non-governmental organisations in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine have had their efforts to assist and protect refugees seriously hampered by political, financial and legislative instability, meaning that instead of running programmes concentrating on integration and longer-term goals they have found themselves having to implement programmes of emergency assistance to refugees. NGOs have found this frustrating, but have remained focused. Given the circumstances in which they worked, the results they have achieved are all the more remarkable.

Through this programme, ECRE has contributed significantly to increasing the capacity of refugee-assisting non-governmental organisations and to the understanding of refugee issues and international obligations by lawyers and representatives of non-governmental organisations. For many of the government officials in the field, understanding of refugee matters and of the nature of effective cooperation with the non-governmental organisation sector has also significantly increased.

Representatives of non-governmental organisations appreciate the support ECRE has provided, the sense of solidarity with other refugee-assisting non-governmental organisations and the possibilities to exchange practical know-how with them. This programme has allowed many non-governmental organisations to set themselves and their work in an international context. Many have commented that having contacts with a European refugee organisation has increased their standing in the eyes of their own governments.

The project had three modules: Modules B concentrated on cooperation with the Co-ordinating Council for Assistance to Refugees and Forced Migrants, with ECRE as a partner under the TACIS democracy programme of the European Union. In Module C, ECRE’s ELENA (European Legal Network on Asylum) acted as partner to Memorial Migrants’ Rights lawyers network in their TACIS democracy programme. In both cases the organisations concerned used this support in successfully implementing a major programme of work and, in the case of Memorial, this has already led to the organisation securing considerable funding to secure its work for two further years. Module A concentrated on capacity-building work for individual refugee-assisting NGOs in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.

Over the last two and a half years ECRE carried out:

In addition ECRE supported the establishment of two twinning links involving a non-governmental organisation from the project region and one from central or western Europe.

These activities are described in more detail below.

Given the difficult situation described above, the project must be regarded as a significant achievement. In addition to these activities, the Netherlands Government grant has enabled ECRE to play a significant role in the development of the CISCONF process.

ECRE is committed to continuing this work, which has vital importance for the sector while the situation is so difficult for refugee assistance work. In response to requests from the partner organisations, ECRE will spend more time visiting non-governmental organisations at their places of work, as well as responding to non-governmental organisations requests for focused training, consultancy support and encouraging links with other non-governmental organisations in the ECRE network.

The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs has also generously agreed to support the next year of ECRE’s capacity building programme for refugee-assisting non-governmental organisations.

The objectives of Module A were "to enhance the capacity of non-governmental organisations, lawyers and government officials in refugee issues, to promote refugee law and refugee principles and to support the development of the local non-governmental sector in refugee work by providing training in key refugee related issues and in questions related to organisational development." In order to meet these objectives, ECRE undertook the following activities:

1.6 3rd ECRAN (ECRE Advocacy Network) Workshop on Advocacy Methods: Eichgraben, Austria; 4th-6th June 1998. Bursary for one participant from Memorial Lawyers network.

Bursaries for the Conference on Integration of Refugees in Europe: Antwerp, Belgium: 12^th -14^th November, 1998.

ECRE arranged for five people from the region to attend this event, with UNHCR participating with funding for government representatives from Ukraine. The aim of the conference was to exchange information and good practice and debate policy recommendations on integration. Over 300 representatives of refugee community groups, national governments, refugee assisting NGOs and academics attended. Overall, participants from Eastern Europe felt that despite the fact that there are significant practical differences between the present situation in Russia and Ukraine and other parts of Europe, there were issues and problems concerning the integration of refugees, which are common to all countries.

ECRE provided seven bursaries were for its biannual general meeting. The people involved were Svetlana Gannushkina and Olga Tchernyshova (who had been asked to contribute to the first plenary session) from Memorial Human Rights Centre, Lydia Grafova of the Co-ordinating Council on Help to Refugees and Forced Migrants, Oksana Kharitonova, director of the Moscow NGO "Solidarnost", Leonid Derkatch of the Kyiv Foundation on Help to Refugees; Regimund Bydrus, Director of the Lithuanian Red Cross, Vladimir Kravchenko of Belarusian Medical Workers (which is responsible for the Refugee Counselling Services in Belarus).

ECRE provided bursaries for two lawyers from the Memorial legal network to attend the CISCONF meeting in Geneva and the associated NGO meetings.

ECRE provided bursaries for nine NGO representatives to attend this meeting, which aimed to ensure that NGOs in Central and Eastern Europe benefited from sharing the information gathered by the ECRE Task Force on Integration since 1998. NGOs from Central and Eastern Europe indicated that integration services for refugees were of limited quality and scope and were almost exclusively provided by NGOs and UNHCR rather than national governments.

In order to explore these issues further, this event took the form of a regional conference with workshops concentrating on specific integration projects from across Europe. Plenary sessions included a presentation of ECRE’s Policy Paper on Integration and a presentation by UNHCR on integration of refugees in Central and Eastern Europe. Working groups were run on the themes of Advocacy; Housing; Teachers and education; Employment and Community Development.

ECRE Biannual General Meeting ‘Refugees in Europe: campaigning, public awareness and the media’ in Paris from May 12-14 2000.

ECRE provided nine bursaries for NGO representatives from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine to attend this meeting along with around 150 representatives of ECRE member agencies and other NGOs working with refugees in over 30 countries of Europe. The themes of working with the media and reaching the public were considered of great relevance to participants from the project countries.

1.9 Workshop on the Legal and Social Protection of Refugees: Kyiv, Ukraine 29^th -30^th June 1998

This preliminary workshop focused on the general themes of the provision of legal and social services to refugees and asylum seekers and brought together 25 participants from NGOs in various cities in Ukraine with Barry Stoyle of the Refugee Legal Centre in the United Kingdom and Malgorzata Gerbert of Polish Humanitarian Action. The seminar concluded with a group planning exercise with the aim of identifying problem areas and areas where ECRE could usefully provide support.

This meeting was organised by ECRE and UNHCR BO Minsk and provided an opportunity for representatives of NGOs to meet middle-ranking civil servants and discuss the possibilities of strengthening the relationships between officials and non-governmental organisations engaged in refugee related issues. ECRE arranged the participation of the Head of the Czech government’s refugee service and from a senior Czech NGO figure. The workshop ended with participants making some very practical suggestions for the ways in which they could work together in the future.

This meeting involved 17 representatives of Russian refugee-assisting NGOs. Ladislav Lajciak, Director of Bjoernson Society, Slovakia attended and provided an insight into the work of his organisation. The aim was to assess the situation of refugee assisting NGOs following the financial upheaval of August/September 1998, to share information about the work of similar NGOs in central and western Europe with local NGOs and to promote the exchange of information among NGOs working (in different regions of the Russian Federation) specifically with refugees and asylum seekers from outside the Commonwealth of Independent States.

This meeting was organised by ECRE and UNHCR BO Minsk. This was a further opportunity for representatives of NGOs to meet middle-ranking civil servants. It was attended by 27 participants. Discussions centred on a key aspect of the integration of refugees, which is of considerable interest in Belarus as refugees have recently started receiving a form of recognition. ECRE arranged for Areti Sianni (ECRE Integration Policy Officer) and Pavel Tychtl (Director of a Czech refugee assisting NGO) to provide input on integration issues across Europe and in the Czech Republic in particular.

This regional planning event was held at a conference venue outside central Moscow and involved around 35 participants from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova. The meeting was led by George Gawlinski and Lois Graessle, of "Planning Together Associates", an organisation which specialises in helping NGOs to plan co-operation and co-ordination of activities more effectively, and which has worked extensively with ECRE in the past on the Central Europe programme. Three representatives from ECRE were present, as well as four facilitators from NGOs in Russia, Lithuania and Bulgaria.

The aim of the meeting was to bring NGOs together in a way which would allow real opportunities for experience sharing. The aims were: to pave the way for future co-operation between NGOs in the region, to allow ECRE to present its commitment to becoming a truly pan-European organisation, and to hear what the NGOs present had to say about which direction its future work in Eastern Europe should take

ECRE assisted with the facilitation of this joint Caritas/Federal Migration Service seminar, which involved over 50 representatives of the Russian Federal Migration Service and the central Russian section of Caritas. Several branches of Caritas, in Moscow and elsewhere, are active in assisting all categories of migrants through provision of legal, psychological and humanitarian support. The purpose of the seminar was to discuss these examples of good practice, and to look for areas for future co-operation. The seminar also involved other NGOs working in the field of refugee reception. It has resulted in a Memorandum of co-operation between Caritas Russia and the Russian government, and should lead to a number of joint projects in Moscow and other parts of central European Russia.

ECRE held this training course at the suggestion of a number of participants at November 1999’s NGO planning meeting, where it was stressed that organisations often had applications refused and could not always understand why. Agencies proposed concrete projects, which they worked on during the meeting with the assistance of ECRE staff members who also, with the help of check lists on various aspects of project planning and proposal writing, took participants through each stage of the proposal-writing process. By the end of the seminar many of the 13 NGOs from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus represented had fairly complete project proposals that were almost ready for submission to donors.

This was a joint seminar held with UNHCR LO Minsk. It had been planned during and after a support visit to Minsk in March 2000, and brought together around 50 representatives of the Belarusian government, regional Migration Services and NGOs working on refugee integration projects in Belarus. The meeting discussed the limited possibilities for refugee integration in a political and economic climate such as that of Belarus, but participants nonetheless reacted positively to the experiences of the speakers ECRE had invited from Slovenia, Ukraine and the ECRE Secretariat. As the status determination procedure in Belarus continues and more than the present 350 refugees become recognised, the need to address the issues of integration becomes greater, and this seminar, according to the views of its participants, laid a good basis for future projects and NGO-government co-operation.

1.12 Bursaries to the European Legal Network on Asylum Advanced International Course on Refugee Law as a response to Failure of State Protection: Paris, France 20^th - 22^nd November 1998

ECRE provided bursaries to three representatives of NGOs working on legal issues in the Russian Federation and Ukraine to attend the course. These were Svetlana Gannushkina, Head of the Memorial "Migrants Rights" network, Margarita Petrossian - legal consultant to the same network and Volodymyr Yevintov, Director of the Ukrainian Human Rights Foundation.

This course was supported by the MATRA programme and UNHCR and was organised in collaboration with the Moscow-based Memorial Human Rights Centre. The course, which was taught by the leading refugee law academics, Professor James Hathaway and Professor Walter Kälin, brought together some 130 government officials, judges, lawyers, and NGO legal advisors from Belarus, Moldova, Russia and Ukraine. The course provided an in-depth analysis of the refugee definition contained in the 1951 Convention relation to the Status of Refugees, the principle of non-refoulement under the 1951 Convention and international human rights law, and detention of asylum seekers under international law.

1.14 Study visit to France and Czech Republic: 31^st October — 14th November 1998

A two week study visit for two representative of the Ukrainian NGO the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) (one from Kyiv and one from Uzhgorod) and a representative of the Kyiv Charitable Foundation for Assistance to Refugees. The participants spent a week observing the work of France Terre D'Asile in Paris and then a further week with the Czech Helsinki Committee in Prague.

ECRE and the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee organised a visit for Inna Barysevich, a lawyer with the Refugee Counselling Service of the Belarusian Movement of Medical Workers, Minsk. She wished to learn about legal assistance for refugees in Bulgaria.

In both Central and Eastern Europe, ECRE has become convinced that the most effective way of strengthening NGO work is to promote long term partnerships between agencies to allow ideas and working practices to be discussed against a background of full information about each other. These aim to facilitate the transfer of skills, working practices and information between twinned refugee-assisting agencies.

The first twinning was a three-way relationship between Refugee Action in the UK, Solidarnost in Russia, and Edelweiss in Ukraine. The partnership involved a study visit by a representative of Refugee Action to Moscow and Kyiv in April 2000, which was followed up by a return visit in July 2000, where the organisations focused on co-operation in the field of refugee community development. The second partnership is between SOZE in the Czech Republic and the Refugee Counselling Service in Belarus, which is expected to focus on provision of legal assistance to asylum-seekers. The first meeting under this partnership is now planned for November 2000 in Bruno.

1.16 The following ECRE reports and policy papers are now available in Russian:

The objectives of Module B were to assist the development among migrants of self-reliant community groups and to promote the exchange of skills, knowledge and experience among these groups and between them and organisations in western Europe with relevant experience.

Module B of the programme covered activities carried out under the Coordinating Council on Help to Refugees and Forced Migrants’ TACIS Democracy Programme project for which the ECRE/MATRA project is providing the matching funds. ECRE’s main role in this module, has been to provide funding for significant numbers of participants to attend the events listed below; to organise appropriate speakers and trainers and to provide CCHRFM with continuing advice and support with information and ideas.

2.2 2^nd Forum Conference, Moscow, 22^nd-23^rd April 1998

The theme of the conference was "The Role of Public Organisations of Migrants in the Solution of Migration Problems". Representatives of the some 200 migrant’s organisations throughout the Russian Federation attended.

ECRE consultant Bill Seary ran this workshop on strategic planning together with Elena Egorova from CCHFRM. ECRE employed freelance trainer Karen Culver to cover the fundraising aspects of the course. Basics principles of community fundraising and gathering resources from companies and general public were discussed. Forty-seven people from across the Russian Federation participated in this workshop, twenty- three under this project and twenty-four supported by UNHCR.

‘Economic activities of migrant NGOs’ in Moscow from January 25-29 2000.

‘Third Congress of the Forum of Migrants’ Organisations’, Moscow, April 19-21 2000.

Over 400 participants attended this event, the majority from migrants’ organisations. Government speakers included the new head of the now-disbanded Federal Migration Service, and spokespeople from intergovernmental organisations including UNHCR, IOM and OSCE.

5. The module objectives included developing a network of legal counselling points across Russia which would monitor legislation and practice as it affects refugees and forced migrants; establishing a database on legislative developments and legal norms linking counselling points throughout Russia; to provide legal advice and representation in selected cases.

6. Indeed, the establishment of the Migrants’ Rights legal network with the Memorial Human Rights Centre as its focal point has been perhaps the most dramatic NGO development since 1996. The lawyers in the network provide legal advice to asylum seekers and forced migrants and represent them in court if necessary. Most of these lawyers are affiliated to NGOs. The network has shown that the provision of legal support in courts of all instances can improve the situation of refugees and forced migrants, accelerate court decisions and create positive legal precedents. Memorial lawyers have had some significant success in winning court cases on behalf of refugees and forced migrants, and have set legal precedents as a result.

6.1 ECRE contributed to this programme by providing attending the events listed below and providing consultancy and advice as well as direct financial support during the economic crisis of 1998. A significant part of ECRE’s work for Module C involved organising expert international speakers to attend seminars and workshops; representatives of international organisations such as the UN and the Council of Europe; representatives of government bodies, such as the Head of the Nationalities Directorate of the UK Home office; refugee lawyers, academics and representatives of international NGOs.

In the first four months of 1999 ECRE was extensively involved in a consultancy group working on longer- term fund-raising strategies for the Migrants’ Rights network together with Memorial Human Rights Centre and UNHCR Moscow. This consultancy group was part-financed by the Ford Foundation. The culmination of this work was that Memorial successfully applied for a grant of approximately $1 million from two American foundations to allow them to expand the Migrants’ rights network over the next two years to include 50 legal consultancy points, making legal aid accessible to approximately 75% of refugees and forced migrants in the Russian Federation

ECRE also provided fundraising consultancy for Memorial’s project for a refugee reception centre in Ingushetia, where the majority of Chechen refugees fled after the conflict began again. The project proposed a centre to co-ordinate the provision of humanitarian assistance and provide advice and counselling for the displaced, as well as information for the media in Russia and elsewhere. ECRE was pleased that the Dutch organisation "Stichting Vluchteling" agreed to fund the project in early 2000.

ECRE has also been involved in commenting on funding proposals from various NGOs throughout the region; including: Caritas St Petersburg; Caritas Zapad; and HACRE from Perm region.

The process started in 1996 at the Regional Conference to Address the problems of Refugees, Displaced Persons, Other Forms of Involuntary Displacement and Returnees in the Countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States and Relevant Neighbouring States (CISCONF). ECRE played an active part in the CISCONF, in particular by working as joint lead agency of the Protection and Refugee Legislation NGO Working Group in 1998. The CISCONF meetings have also provided important networking opportunities for refugee assisting NGOs in general and for the advancement of the ECRE programme in particular. ECRE has attended all meetings of the Working Group on Protection and Refugee Legislation.

On 3-4 December 1999, a seminar on "Standards of Proof and Undocumented Asylum Seekers" was organised by this working group which took place in Prague. Clara Odofin, Legal officer with ECRE attended this meeting and gave a presentation on international standards for fair and efficient refugee status determination procedures. ECRE also arranged for expert speakers to address the seminar. ECRE hopes to continue to play a role in the extended CISCONF process in the future.

Rachel Bugler is project co-ordinator, Daniel Drake is project officer. Bill Seary is project consultant. The post of Head of Development and Membership is held by ECRE’s former co-ordinator for Central and Eastern Europe, Allan Leas.