A NEW law intended to reunite families under EU harmonisation rules will not only keep wives from joining husbands working in Cyprus, but actually threatens to separate families already here.
The law drew immediate fire from Yiannakis Erotocritou, a lawyer, human rights advocate and vice president of the Association for the Support of Foreign Workers.
He declared the law “unconstitutional on grounds of denial of equality before the law,” and pledged to take the matter up with Attorney-general Alecos Markides, as soon as the latter returns from Cyprus proximity talks in New York.
If that does not get the law changed, Erotocritou said he would challenge the law in the Cyprus Supreme Court and even take it to the European Court of Human Rights.
The law was passed on July 21, just before the House broke up for its summer recess.
As it reads now, the law requires foreigners to have worked on a valid work permit in Cyprus for five years before being allowed to bring their wives and children to live here.
That presents a catch-22 situation for many workers, especially housemaids and labourers mainly from Asian countries.
They are issued work permits good for a maximum of four years. These permits are generally not renewable. When they expire, the workers are sent home for good, government officials acknowledged.
Only those foreigners – usually Westerners – doing more specialised work for international companies or local Cyprus businesses can possibly hope to renew their work permits annually to meet the new five-year hurdle for bringing their wives to Cyprus, officials said.
And even then, some workers whose permits expire before they have spent five years here will have to send their wives and families home until after they renew their permits and have worked the extra months needed to meet the new five-year criterion, Antonis Economides, Section Head of the Immigration Department’s Visitors Section said.
“Offshore workers not here for five years cannot bring their spouses, except for a three-month holiday period once each year,” Economides said.
The same applies to foreign employees of local companies who have worked here less than five years, return home to get married, and want to bring their brides back to Cyprus, Interior Ministry Permanent Secretary Kyriacos Tryantaphylides said.
The only way to beat the system, Economides said, is for a bride to come to Cyprus on a tourist visa, independent of her husband and never mention they were married or she even knew him.
She would then have to prove she could support herself on her own, and thereafter could live with him at her discretion – keeping out of the glare of the authorities.
“If she has her own means to support herself, a foreign currency account with a sufficient amount of money, and she does not say her husband is working here, I would say yes, she could stay indefinitely,” and renew her visas year after year, Economides said.
Workers who already have their wives here, but have not yet worked five years in Cyprus face a different set of problems under the “family reunion” law, Economides said.
“The spouse’s residency permit is valid until the end of (the husband’s work) permit, and she has the right to stay with him. We shall not cancel the permits,” he said, “but they are not renewable” for the wives, he added.
So expats who have worked for local companies for less than five years must send their dependent spouses home when their current work permits expire, Economides said.
Costas Paschalis, advisor in the office of Cyprus’ chief EU negotiator George Vassiliou, said he was “perplexed” by the stringent five-year requirement of the Cyprus “family unification law.”
The law he helped draft, he said, was “intended to harmonise with EU law… to allow the reunion of family members,” and did not contain the harsh five-year provision.
He said his draft “provided that a foreigner who had worked for 15 months” – not five years – could apply to bring his wife and family to Cyprus. Somewhere the draft was changed.
The Attorney-general’s office confirmed the draft had been changed — “but not by Parliament. It was submitted to Ministry of Interior, but they had reservations in the Ministry, and they changed it to what you are reading now.”
Paschalis insisted the law did not refer to EU citizens, although nowhere in the amendment is this spelled out.
But Mehran Eftekhar, president of CIBA, the Cyprus International Business Association, had no illusions about what the law was about:
“I think they were really targeting the maids and the domestic workers,” he said, out of fear that Cyprus would be swamped with their families if they could stay the five years to bring them here.
