Kazakhstan is the second significant country of destination of migrant workers from Central Asia after Russia. According to experts, more than 2 million people enter it to find a job. Very often, adults come with children, thus involving them to the unsafe migration process.
It is difficult to estimate the scope of this phenomenon as there is no single and systemic statistics on migrant children. According to the UNICEF Kazakhstan, tracking down the migration of children is a hard task both regarding foreign citizens entering the country, and regarding the migrants moving inside the country.
In its reply to CABAR.asia, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) Kazakhstan said about unclear information about the number of migrant works and their children residing in Kazakhstan because of some flaws in the systems of registration and irregular labour migration. Nevertheless, according to them, there are official data on the number of migrant children attending schools.
In 2020-2021 academic year, according to the National Educational Database, 20,349 migrant children and 731 refugee children studied at schools, and 93 migrant children studied at vocational and training schools.
The mapping of migrants who were bogged down in Kazakhstan held in February 2021 by IOM Kazakhstan found that migrants who fell upon hard times were mainly men (72%) at the age of 25 to 44 (68%) and natives of the three countries neighbouring Kazakhstan (80%): Uzbekistan – 51%, Tajikistan – 15%, Russia – 14%. 46 per cent of respondents specified their status as married, more than a half of respondents (68%) had children. 93 per cent of them had 1 to 4 children. One-third of children (32.5%) live with respondents in Kazakhstan.
According to official statistics, the main countries of departure of migrant children are neighbours in the region.
Children involved into migration process are the most vulnerable category of migrants. Because of their age and especially with no parental care, birth registration or no citizenship, they face a bigger, in fact double risk, as compared to adults, of abuse, labour exploitation, detention.
The international law binds the states to observe and protect rights of all children in their territories.
“Children involved in migration processes, just like all children, have a right to be protected from all forms of violence, exploitation and abuse,” Aislu Bekmusa, chief of UNICEF childhood protection programmes, emphasised in the interview to CABAR.asia. “The best interests of children must be taken into account in all decisions concerning migrant children because migration is not always their choice.”
Protection algorithm
The Programme protecting children affected by migration is meant to build an effective model supporting migrant children in Kazakhstan. It covers three regions, which receive the biggest flow of migrants with unregulated status from Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. These are Nur-Sultan, Almaty, Shymkent and Turkestan region.
The target group of the programme are children affected both by international and by internal migration:
- Children who are migrants themselves (whether separated or accompanied);
- Children who remain in Kazakhstan while one or both parents/legal guardians have migrated to another country;
- Children born in Kazakhstan from migrant parents;
- Children who come back to Kazakhstan as the country of origin (returning migrants).
The key part of the effective system of protection of migrant children is case management. According to UNICEF definition, it is a “process carried out by social workers, that supports or regulates the provision of social assistance to socially vulnerable children, families and other groups of people in need.”
According to the developed model of protection of rights of migrant children, case management is assigned to special regional state facilities – CAM (Centre for Adaptation of Minors) and CCS (Centre for Children Support), which receive migrant children left without parental care.
Specialists of these facilities become case managers, in other words, they are responsible for coordination of assistance provided to a child/family, as well as for completion of documents and case management in all stages of social support. In particular, they assess the needs of a child, determine if they require care and protection, and also develop, coordinate and monitor the individual plan of support, according to Aislu Bekmusa.
NGOs act as a “service provider” in this model.
“It means that every time NGO contacts a child, who, in its opinion, may need care and protection, it must refer a child to CAM/CCS for case management if a child is older than 3 years old,” she said. “If a child is under 3, they are sent to the healthcare department (children of this age are sent to the orphanage – author’s note).”
If a child does not need care and protection, they can be sent directly to the NGO for legal, social support or counselling.
By results of the project, a range of documents, including recommendations on enforcement of basic rights of children affected by migration, have been developed. They discuss various stages of the process ranging from data collection and child identification to improvement of short-term, mid-term and long-term decisions for children involved in migration processes.
Life with restrictions
The project is implemented by NGO “Legal Centre of Women’s Initiatives ‘Sana Sezim’” in Shymkent and Turkestan region. According to the NGO representative, Raushan Khudaishukurova, they covered 70 children – 37 girls and 33 boys – by the programme from April 2020 to April 2021.
“All our cases are virtually related to issues in documentation,” Khudaishukurova said. “Very often, children born to parents with no documents have no documents themselves.”
Until recently, migrant women without documents could not apply for a child’s birth certificate in Kazakhstan. Only in 2019, the Code of Kazakhstan “On marriage and family” was amended to allow them to apply.
“A child cannot be taken back home because a child born in Kazakhstan has no documents,” Khudaishukurova said. “Undocumented children and adults have limited access to education, social, medical and other services within the country. We can say this is the root of all problems as migrants can neither study, get medical treatment, nor work without documents.”
In most cases, according to the analysis of requests to the NGO, undocumented migrant children do not attend kindergartens or schools. Even if the school administration makes concessions and accepts children to school, it cannot issue a certificate upon completion of 9th or 11th grade.
Further consequences are impossibility to continue study at a university, unskilled instable labour, material hardships, plus impossibility to get social allowances. In this “shadow” regime, according to the specialist, migrants have lived for years, and even decades.
Raushan Khudaishukurova provided an example of a migrant woman from Uzbekistan with unregulated status. She could register the fact of birth of only one of her three children. With no permanent home, they roam around and hire beggarly and unsanitary places. Her children have never attended a kindergarten, whereas her eldest seven-year-old daughter has not even started school. Moreover, a whole bunch of diseases was found in them.
They need to have documents in order to get entirely free medical aid and other services. First, their mother has to restore documents. When the woman went to Uzbekistan to do so, she could not get back to Kazakhstan for almost two months because of the pandemic-related restrictions.
All this time their father, a documented Kazakhstani, did not work as he was taking care of his little children. Therefore, workers of ‘Sana Sezim’ helped them with food, children’s accessories, hygienic sets, etc. in addition to the provision of a certificate for return, execution of various certificates.
Photo: UNICEF/Roman Gusak
Out of reach
Provision of legal aid to children with unclear nationalities and facing the risk of statelessness, assistance to execution of their documents is one of the directions of their activity to reduce statelessness.
According to the information provided by the UNHCR, 7,118 people in Kazakhstan, including less than 2 per cent of children under 18, have had the status of stateless citizens early this year. The number of persons without documents and/or persons whose citizenship is currently unclear is unknown.
From January 1, 2014 to December 2020, the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and the Rule of Law and Legal Centre of Women’s Initiatives ‘Sana Sezim’ identified more than 6.5 thousand persons with unclear citizenship.
According to the representative of UNHCR in Kazakhstan, Irina Bilyalova, they have no access to basic rights and liberties, cannot get medical or social help, education, pensions and allowances, have no chance to get official employment.
Refugees face tight situation, as well. They are considered temporary foreign residents regardless of duration of their actual stay in Kazakhstan.
“In the Republic of Kazakhstan, Labour Code and relevant regulations provide for the right to work for refugees registered by the state. However, the temporary status of a refugee (according to the law on refugees, it is issued for one year and shall be revised annually) does not always allow refugees to find regular job because employers are unwilling to employ them as they are not sure whether their status would be prolonged,” Bilyalova said.
According to the national law, refugees and asylum seekers do not have a right to receive public welfare payments: disability pay, survivor’s benefit, birth grant, benefit for care for a disabled child, and other payments. They may not pay contributions to the pension fund and do not receive pensions.
According to the expert, they have little access to medical services. Asylum seekers and refugees residing in Kazakhstan are excluded from the medical insurance system.
All temporarily residing foreigners, including asylum seekers and refugees, have a right to receive medical assistance in case of acute conditions that are hazardous for other people and to receive emergency care. Other basic medical services are available to them only for a fee, which is not affordable for the refugees and asylum seekers.
In early 2021, Kazakhstan had 678 refugees and asylum seekers, including 226 children. According to UNHCR, refugees should not be deemed as migrants.
“These people fled wars, violence, conflicts or persecutions and crossed the international border seeking security in another country,” they said in the organisation. “Migrants cross the border for other reasons, mainly to improve their life by finding a job, or, in some cases, to get education, to reunite with their families, etc.”
Issues and obstacles
IOM Kazakhstan admits that the republic meets its obligations under article 28 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in part of getting education by migrant children. It ensures that they get a full scope of services in CAMs, as determined by the standard of special social services in the field of education and protection of children’s rights.
Meanwhile, IOM emphasises the obstacles existing currently and related to the needs of migrants who are in vulnerable condition:
- Lack of specially developed programmes of basic social services adapted to the needs of vulnerable migrants;
- Lack of educational programmes tailored for the needs of women, children and adolescent migrants;
- Lack of information about rights of migrants and legal aid and access to the mechanisms of complaint lodging to protect their rights, including rights to basic social services.
There are risks in the field of social integration and integration, access to basic social services, especially for illegal and vulnerable migrants, children and women.
IOM specifies the major issues in the protection of children’s rights as documentation of children born from undocumented parents, access to undocumented children to vaccination and other social services, as well as the need to solve the issue of registration of all children upon border crossing.
Currently, children aged 7 and older may be registered when crossing the border of Kazakhstan. Children under 7 usually travel with an adult, who is legally responsible for the child, but children’s movements are not registered.
If a child gets separated from the person accompanying them during border crossing, it would be useful to record information about border crossing to facilitate further reunion, according to IOM. Registration of movements of younger children may also motivate their parents who don’t travel with children to ensure temporary care of them by means of issuing a power of attorney.
In their comment about the national legal framework, IOM noted that Kazakhstan guarantees protection of rights and freedoms of migrant workers according to their Constitution, laws and international treaties. In response to the growing labour migration, the country has improved its legal framework regulating migration, but it has no systemisation so far.
“Kazakhstan has improved comprehensive regional cooperation by becoming a participant of a range of regional agreements, especially in the framework of CIS, and signed bilateral and trilateral agreements with Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. However, these agreements require update in terms of comprehensive protection of migrants, especially in the current Covid-19 emergency situation,” IOM said.