Authorities decided Friday to proceed with the immediate implementation of additional measures and control mechanisms, to combat the phenomenon of sham marriages, in parallel with a constant review of the existing system.
“With these measures we believe that we will be able to more effectively control a phenomenon that seems to be exploited by organised crime in our country, in collaboration with foreigners, which essentially amounts to the generating of trafficking victims,” said acting Interior Minister Ionas Nicolaou speaking following a meeting he chaired with the relevant departments.
Nicolaou said that some of the existing procedures would be changed to make it more difficult for people to stage sham weddings, which allow one of the two taking part to reside in Cyprus or any other EU country if the other of the couple is a European citizen.
The minister said that in order for the system to work, a constant review of the control mechanisms had to be enforced as criminal circles found ways to evade the procedures being used at the moment.
Nicolaou pointed out that Friday’s was the second of such meetings on the subject to have taken place in the space of a few days and that in which proposals made during the last had been evaluated and specific decisions made.
The minister said some of the measures decided in the last meeting had already started being implemented and that about 15 others would be applied from Saturday.
“Today we decided to implement additional control mechanisms and to review existing ones,” he said.
“For example, the issuing of yellow slips within a short period of time seems to have been one element which made things easy for some people, so we decided to review this procedure and to issue them within the timeframe allotted by the EU, that is six months, not immediately when we are dealing with cases which are deemed suspicious.”
Nicolaou also said that decisions were taken to carry out preventive controls through interviews of persons for whom there were indications pointing to them having conducted a sham marriage or persons falling in a high-risk category based on the information they presented.
The new measures will make sure that various departments including the social insurance, migration, the police’s immigration and migration sections coordinated their actions.
Specialised training programmes would be laid on for the staff involved in these areas.
Sham marriages usually involve Asian men wishing to live is Europe paying a middleman who arranges a marriage with a EU national woman, usually from the former eastern bloc, who is brought to Cyprus and for a fee carries out the marriage to the man she has never met, leaving her with a few thousand euros and him with EU citizenship.
