Bosnia de facto support action

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Bosnia de facto support action , or de facto action for short , was a construction compared to the conventional asylum practice when many war refugees came to Austria as a result of the Yugoslav wars , especially the Bosnian war . There was talk of “de facto” refugees because they were not de jure refugees and therefore did not have a residence permit .

Course of the action

The support campaign began at the end of 1991 when tensions between the three ethnic groups in Bosnia-Herzegovina - the Bosniaks , the Serbs and the Croats - began to escalate. At that time Austria had space for 30,000 asylum seekers, with a nine-fold increase in the number of applications from people from the former Yugoslavia. Politically, it was decided under the Vranitzky government to prepare a further 60,000 places and to make this known.

Since only a small proportion of the displaced were granted refugee status under the Geneva Convention , no proceedings were initiated under the Geneva Convention and the Federal Care Act, but residence was granted under the Residence Act . With an Austrian solution they were treated as equal to refugees under international law. At the same time, the accommodation and care of war refugees had to be arranged with the federal states.

The actual support campaign for de facto refugees from Yugoslavia ended on February 29, 1992; for cases of hardship there was an expiry period of March 31, 1992. The measure as a whole ran until August 1998.

aftermath

At that time, around 90,000 people were admitted, around two thirds of whom stayed in Austria and were integrated . Around 11,000 returned to their home country, the others moved on to other asylum countries.

It was praised that refugee applications were not abducted during the campaign, and that instead of disputes over competence between authorities, ministries, federal and state governments, the necessary decisions were made unbureaucratically in the Ministry of the Interior , then under Franz Löschnak . The measure was considered a direct implementation of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) , which Austria had signed in 1958.

In principle, Austria has traditionally close relations with Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was part of Austria-Hungary for 40 years before the First World War . From the 1970s, however, there was increasing resentment towards guest workers from the Balkan region (see the swear word " Tschusch "). The de facto action can be seen as the end of this phase and coincides with the European integration process ( Austria joined the EU in  1995).

The generally possible measure (international protection ex officio) was applied again in the Syria conflict in 2013/14, when 1,500 Syrian people were taken in directly from the areas of civil war. However, because of the escalating refugee crisis in 2015 with hundreds of thousands of refugees, it was no longer considered.

See also

literature

  • Helmut Kodydek: The Balkan conflict and the Bosnia de facto support campaign in Austria 1992–1998. Diploma thesis, University of Vienna. Faculty of Social Sciences, 2011 ( abstract and pdf , othes.univie.ac.at).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Why in 1992 worked what fails today: The republic did what it was supposed to do. Lukas Zimmer on ORF News , August 10, 2015.
  2. ↑ a b Entry de facto action. In: Zebra - Intercultural Counseling and Therapy Center: Lexicon , zebra.or.at, accessed December 12, 2015.
  3. ^ Bosnians in Vienna: Come to stay. Köksal Baltaci in Die Presse April 5, 2012 (online).
  4. ↑ Austria accepts an additional 1,000 Syrian refugees. in: Der Standard online, April 20, 2014.