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Andrei Svištš and Ramon Rask discuss legal issues related to the arrival of war refugees in the Edasi.org online magazine

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Andrei Svištš and Ramon Rask discuss legal issues related to the arrival of war refugees in the Edasi.org online magazine

On 10 April, the online magazine Edasi.org published an in-depth article in which RASK legal experts Andrei Svištš and Ramon Rask explain the legal side of the arrival of Ukrainian war refugees and the rights and obligations for the individual and the Estonian state that underlie various legal concepts.

“We live in a strange time where everything is severe to the extreme: if it’s a disease, it is a pandemic; if the energy price is high, it is higher by a factor of ten; if it’s an armed conflict, then it is an outright war. The severity of the issues also means that the amount of information produced is enormous. This, in turn, requires the reader to be even more critical than before, and better able to connect and organise the influx of information for themselves.”

Who is a refugee or an asylum seeker, or are they one and the same? How many applications for international protection has Estonia received in recent years, and how many of them have been granted? In a nutshell, the journey from a visa to a temporary or permanent residence permit and from a refugee to a resident can be very different.

The authors of the article, Ramon Rask and Andrei Svištš, are attorneys at the law firm RASK. During the previous European refugee crisis, in 2015 and 2016, the law firm RASK in cooperation with the Estonian Bar Association completed a two-year pilot project aiming to ensure state legal aid in public law disputes. During that period, RASK advised war refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries who applied for international protection and needed legal assistance in a total of 93 separate administrative matters.