Try This Quiz – Guess Your Nationality!
Meet Awate – An Eritrean national arbitrarily registered as Ethiopian
Over the past months a curious new phenomenon has been observed on our little island in the Aegean. It seems almost like a game or a quiz, if only it wasn’t part of the procedures many asylum seekers need to go through when arriving in Lesvos. Questions are asked and answers are given. At the end, there is a result. Seems easy enough? Great, let’s play:
- What is your nationality?
- How do you know you are a national from there? (Assume you do not have any documents from your country)
- Do you know the tribes and their individual customs in your country? Be specific.
- What are the colours of the flag of your country and what do they mean?
- Did you ever claim to be from a different country and, if not, why is it written on your registration form that you are from Ethiopia?
Thank you for all your answers. Usually you would now be required to wait for several weeks or months to hear back from the authorities but to save you the trouble we can give you your result already:
Wait. This is not your nationality? Well, it does not matter and it will be nearly impossible to challenge this result. Why? This is because before you answered any of the above questions, we looked at you and wrote down that you are Ethiopian, irrespective of any of your answers.
Thank you for playing “Guess your nationality”. This edition has been brought to you by the Greek Asylum Service on Lesvos in cooperation with Frontex.
This silly quiz is unfortunately illustrating the unfair and harmful practices most Eritrean asylum seekers are subjected to since the start of the Summer 2023, as part of their asylum procedures in Lesvos. Regardless of their answers about their country of origin during their registration and asylum interviews, most Eritrean nationals are automatically and arbitrarily presumed to be Ethiopian nationals by the Greek Asylum Service and Frontex. This practice has negatively impacted hundreds of asylum seekers over months, who were as a result rejected without the possibility to express the details of their fear of persecution in their country of origin, had to undergo additional interviews, or saw their procedure delayed because of an incorrect presumption of nationality by the authorities. If this was not enough, this incorrect presumption of people’s country of origin at the time of the registration of their asylum claims cannot be challenged by the asylum seekers or by their lawyers, given that only the result is recorded, not the actual assessment.
While in the last months asylum seekers claiming Eritrean nationality are subjected to a more in depth nationality assessment in their full asylum interviews, this was not always the case and many people had their asylum claims rejected based on the superficial presumption of nationality carried out by Frontex.
In order to illustrate this practice further, let us dive into the story of Awate. Awate was born in 2003 in Eritrea. When he was about five years old, he fled Eritrea with his family to Ethiopia. While he does not remember this himself or understood why they had to flee at the time, he overheard his parents talk about how his father and brother would have needed to join the military if they had stayed. In Ethiopia, Awate and his family were homeless and barely surviving. At the age of seven, Awate was separated from his family and was forced to continue to live by himself on the streets of Addis Ababa. To this day, Awate has not been able to reconnect with his family. Being forced to live by himself and not being in contact with any other Eritreans, Awate lost his mother tongue Tigrinya (which is a common phenomenon among children that do not practise their mother tongue regularly) and speaks only Amharic now. Thanks to volunteers, Awate was able to go to school for five years.
Around the age of 15 or 16, Awate started working. However, since he was Eritrean, he could not receive an ID which meant he had no legal protection and was exposed to exploitation from employers. One of his employers did not want to pay him and when confronted about it, the employer called the police on Awate, who arrested him and detained him for one month for not having an ID. In the prison he and other Eritreans were severely beaten. After this, Awate was arrested multiple times during police raids which targeted Eritreans. Due to this hardship, he took his first chance to escape from Ethiopia and ended up on Lesvos island, where he had to undergo a nationality assessment, since he was presumed to be Ethiopian during his registration.
During his asylum interview, he had to answer questions like the ones we asked you in the quiz at the start. Since Awate spent only the first five years of his life in Eritrea and only two more with his family, his knowledge of Eritrea is understandably limited. He was not able to tell the interviewer the meaning of the colours of the flag of Eritrea. He could tell the interviewer that Ethiopia is a neighbouring country. And he could also not tell the interviewer the main religions of Eritrea other than his own.
His claim of nationality was found not credible and consequently his asylum application was rejected, a decision which was confirmed on appeal. Reasons for the rejection are that Awate was unable to show elementary knowledge of his claimed country of origin and that he only gave general information about Eritrea which can be easily found on the internet. This is despite the fact that he was only asked general questions about Eritrea such as those posed here. Paradoxically, the asylum service claimed that because Awate went to school for five years in Ethiopia, he should have a better understanding of Eritrea and its culture.
This decision begs the question how are applicants supposed to answer? How can a person prove that they are nationals from a country that they lived in for only the first few years of their life? What is the sweet spot between knowing too little and knowing too much about Eritrea to be deemed believable? All of this shows that this silly quiz is in fact not silly at all.
It is a quiz that in effect forces asylum seekers to stay for extended periods of time in the Lesvos CCAC where they live in inhumane conditions, facing insecurity, instability and unfair treatment. It also denies them the right to have their application assessed individually on the risks they are facing in their country of origin. This practice denies people access to the asylum procedure and cannot easily be challenged given the lack of transparency during the screening and registration procedures and the lack of any effective remedies against them.
These practices are unlawful and must stop!