IN A SURPRISE ruling, the Supreme Court yesterday decided to release a 40-year-old Serbian man who has been detained for 83 days pending deportation for overstaying his visa, stating that the man is now free to live and work in Cyprus.
The Supreme Court claimed that the government should have already implemented an EU law granting long-term residency to anyone who has lived in Cyprus for over five years, and that therefore the Neboja Micovic, who has been in Cyprus for seven years now, must be retroactively granted long-term residency.
The Supreme Court decision will have major implications not only for Micovic but for all of those who may have been eligible for long-term residency in Cyprus by accession date or who may have faced deportation in the next few months, before the new directive is implemented on January 1.
Yesterday’s surprise court ruling comes only one day after the Interior Minister, Andreas Christou, had in effect ruled out the chances that Micovic would be able to stay on the island, despite the fact that he has a wife as well as two Greek-speaking young daughters who have spent the past seven years in Cyprus and think of the island as their home.
At Thursday’s House Finance Committee, the Interior Minister said that there are 100,000 foreigners living in Cyprus, whether legally or illegally, with about 40,000 of those coming from EU member states.
“We are the southeastern corner of the EU,” Christou said, “and we cannot look at every case separately, with feelings of sympathy or support, outside of the framework of the law.”
Micovic, who was in detention for almost three months, fled the war from his homeland in Yugoslavia and came to Cyprus in 1998. He then applied for a work permit, which was granted to him until the end of 1999.
Christou said that despite the fact that he overstayed his permit until 2002, another work permit was issued to him, this one valid until May 2005.
When Micovic again applied, his request was rejected. After overstaying his visa for several months, he was then taken on August 27 into detention, a decision that he appealed in the Supreme Court.
After the court ruling, the Micovic family said they were delighted that they will get to spend Christmas together.
The case recently came into the limelight when parents of students who attend the same Limassol public school as one of Micovic’s daughter staged protests, demanding that the government release Micovic and let him stay in Cyprus with his wife and children.
At Thursday’s meeting Christou claimed that the government has been especially lenient with Micovic, not only because they granted him an additional work permit despite his overstaying, but also because they allowed for Micovic to bring his family to Cyprus, something that the Minister claimed is rarely permitted of Third World residents.
Christou said that in other EU countries, the maximum stay is two to three years, not four as Cypriot law allows.
But Doros Polycarpou, President of KISA (Action for Equality, Support and Anti-Racism) has alleged that the refusal to renew Micovic’s visa is because the government is clamping down on migrants who have the possibility of gaining long-term residency starting in January when the new directive is implemented.
“This [directive] will enable people who have been living in Cyprus for more than five years to become eligible for long-term residency”, Polycarpou said.
But with yesterday’s court ruling, it appears that the government will now be forced to grant long-term residency to those who were eligible by accession date as opposed to by January 1, 2006.
A source in the Serbian Embassy told the Cyprus Mail yesterday that last year at least 10 Serbs had been deported because of overstaying their visas, adding that there were between 2,000 and 2,500 Serbs living in Cyprus right now.
The source also said that while a number of Serbs migrated to Cyprus before the war, many more came, like Misovic and his family, in the late 90’s “when things became nasty”.
Micovics’s two daughter – Elena, 13, and Sophia, 9 – travelled to Belgrade last month to represent Cyprus at the European children’s gathering ‘The Joy of Europe’.
