Interview with Hana Franková from the Organization for Aid to Refugees (OPU)

Tell us about your organisation

The Organization for Aid to Refugees (OPU) is the oldest and largest non-governmental organisation helping refugees, migrants and stateless people in Czechia, with offices in Prague, Brno, Hradec Králové, Ostrava and Plzeň. Our team consists of approximately 80 dedicated staff members. Our membership grew significantly after Czechia became the largest per capita host of Ukrainian refugees in the EU. We are the long-term national partner of the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and a member of several international networks, including ECRE and the European Network on Statelessness.

We provide free legal and social counselling to refugees, migrants, and stateless people. We also offer psychological help for Ukrainian refugees. Beyond that, we run a community centre offering specialised activities for children and families, and an active elderly women’s club to support long-term integration and well-being. We also run halfway shelter housing in Prague and Brno specifically tailored for young adult migrants.

Regarding the Pact on Migration and Asylum (“the Pact”), has national implementing legislation been adopted in Czechia? If not, has draft legislation been presented?

Yes, Czechia has adopted the Pact on Migration and Asylum in its national law. The Pact’s regulations were implemented by amending the Czech Asylum Act. A substantial number of provisions were removed from the Asylum Act because the Pact regulations are directly applicable, while some procedural mechanisms were directly transferred into the amended national text.

How has the situation for people seeking protection in Czechia changed since the entry into application of the Pact on 12 June?

We have already observed several severe negative impacts on the rights of protection seekers:

Loss of suspensive effect: A significantly higher number of legal appeals against negative decisions no longer carry a suspensive effect. Crucially, cessation complaints submitted to the Supreme Administrative Court – the key body for unifying judicial interpretations – now almost completely lack automatic suspensive effect. As a result, many applicants lose their “right to remain” in the country and are practically deprived of the possibility to pursue their judicial appeals. Sometimes, it seems that the authorities themselves are unclear on when the suspensive effect applies. Very recently, we handled a case involving a person whose previously granted subsidiary protection was not extended. In this scenario, the appeal should have maintained its suspensive effect even after the Pact’s implementation. Instead, the Czech Ministry of the Interior (“the Ministry”) immediately called the police and initiated deportation proceedings.
Deterioration of access to legal aid: The availability of legal assistance has severely declined. Although this is actually not a Pact implementation effect – rather the opposite – it directly undermines the Pact’s core principles, as the Pact actually demands access to legal aid as a balance to its otherwise very strict provisions. However, there are two major problems with legal aid in Czechia:
- First, at the most important moment when individuals intend to apply for asylum, they receive no legal aid whatsoever. This is despite the Pact explicitly guaranteeing the right to information even during this very initial phase.
- Second, the Ministry has excluded NGOs like ours from providing legal assistance, opting instead to contract its own private lawyers at a significantly higher cost. Consequently, our organisation has completely lost access to transit zones and accommodation centres for asylum seekers, even though we are UNHCR implementing partners. Although we currently have access to detention facilities, this will terminate in March 2027. Information, particularly from detention centres, indicates that the current legal aid capacity is completely insufficient relative to the number of detained people who are seeking legal assistance. All of this is happening in spite of the Pact emphasising the access of both the UNHCR and NGOs to asylum seekers.
Airport border procedures: There has been a noticeable increase in the number of people held in the airport transit zone reception centre due to the stricter application of border procedures.
Screening malpractices: We have already encountered alarming signals regarding the incorrect application of the Screening Regulation. We have received information about people in the airport transit area who had expressed an intention to apply for asylum but faced difficulties in submitting their application.

What are your biggest hopes and fears about the situation for people seeking protection in Czechia in the future?

Blanket rejections: Our primary concern relates to the tendency to stop assessing certain applications individually. Since the Pact became applicable on 12 June, the majority of asylum applications in Czechia have been examined in the accelerated procedure. We are concerned that applications are not always assessed with sufficient attention to individual circumstances, particularly for applicants from countries with a recognition rate below 20%. A low recognition rate for a nationality says nothing about the protection needs of the individual applicant. However, in practice, it may lead to a presumption that the application is unfounded. This also concerns applications lodged in detention, which are frequently rejected as manifestly unfounded on the grounds that they are made merely to delay or frustrate the enforcement of a return decision. This ground appears to be applied almost automatically, based on the timing of the application. As a result, applicants with genuine protection needs risk being rejected without their claim being assessed on its merits. We even see blanket rejection from countries which are not even below the 20% threshold, such as Syria which, according to the EU Agency for Asylum, has a 27% recognition rate (historically low, but still not under this threshold). We are especially fearful for highly vulnerable groups such as LGBT+ people from those countries as they face immense risks but struggle to get a fair individual assessment.
Exclusion of Ukrainian refugees: A major burning issue which is not directly tied to the Pact but impacts heavily on our work, is the treatment of Ukrainian refugees. Following the recent Council of the EU decision on the extension of the EU temporary protection regime, men of conscription age are blocked from obtaining temporary protection. Czechia interprets this even more restrictively than the EU decision, denying protection even to men with official military deferments. Although the Pact heavily emphasises unhindered access to asylum procedures, the Ministry has systematically excluded Ukrainians from entering the international protection procedure if they previously applied for temporary protection here, thus depriving them of their right to an individual asylum assessment.
Child detention: A major flaw of the new Pact is that it continues to permit the immigration detention of children despite widespread consensus from experts (judicial as well as psychologists) that this practice is unlawful and profoundly damaging to children’s mental health. However, on a hopeful note, OPU has recently achieved a landmark victory before the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC). It officially ruled that Czechia had violated the rights of children by placing an 11-year-old Afghan girl and her family into immigration detention for over a month. According to the CRC, this is contrary to the best interests of the child under Article 3 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The ruling is not surprising: the CRC has stated in its recommendations for over 10 years that the immigration detention of children is always a violation of the Convention. In 2021, it even explicitly urged Czechia to abandon this practice completely. Now, following this groundbreaking ruling, it has given Czechia one year to report back on the corrective measures it has adopted. This is hugely important: The Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most widely ratified document worldwide. We hope to leverage this international precedent to push for a complete end to child detention – by pointing out our international human rights obligations, which have to be followed even within the Pact framework.

For more information about the Organization for Aid to Refugees (OPU), please visit their website.

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