According to the UN Refugee Agency, Iraq maintained its spot as number one on the list. Russia is trailed by China, Serbia and Pakistan. The Agency reported that some 45.2 thousand Iraqis and 18.8 thousand Russians sought political asylum in 2007. This figure counts the number of applications for asylum to 43 industrialized countries, and does not take other migrations into account. In the case of Iraq, some 2 million persons are estimated to have fled to neighboring Syria and Jordan.

The most common destination countries for refugees were the US, Sweden and France. Some 49.2 thousand persons applied for refugee status to the US, compared with 36.2 thousand to Sweden.

According to Svetlana Gannushkina, the head of the civil assistance committee under the Russian president, “We can see a new wave of applications of [Russian nationals] to Western countries asking them for a [political] asylum.”

At a news conference, Gannushkina revealed that in the last three months alone, a total of 1,200 Russian nationals had requested asylum in the airports of Paris, France. Six hundred of those were from Chechnya.

“People buy transit airline tickets via Paris and ask for a political asylum there without going to the countries they were bound for as per their tickets, mainly Morocco,” she said.

On January 15th, the Memorial human rights group released a report on conditions in the Chechen Republic, which concluded that the region was now under a totalitarian regime led by President Ramzan Kadyrov. Under Kadyrov’s regime, women aren’t allowed in public without headscarves (under a government “battle for morals”), and 80 percent of television coverage focuses on the president. Oleg Orlov, a Memorial activist, commented that after many years of bloody conflict, the region was now in relative peace, with a lower number of kidnappings and crime. He attributed this result to the continuing work of Russian and international human rights activists.

Meanwhile, in Gannushkina’s words, refugee camps have been forcing inhabitants out into the streets. Chechen residents living in nearby republics are being personally pressured into returning to Chechnya by Kadyrov:

“For instance, people aren’t hired for work, and are forced to regularly register their fingerprints. Their social rights are being violated,” she said.

According to the activist, the French Interior Ministry has an order which states that Chechens should not be extradited from France.