Foreign nationals are registered only upon entering Ukraine
“Ukraine needs to change its attitude to visiting foreign nationals,” Colonel General Borys Oleksiyenko, chairman of Derzhkomkordon [State Committee for the Protection of the State Border], declared at a July 13 news conference. He noted that, while Poland is annually visited by 280 million tourists, the number visiting Ukraine “in the best tourist years” is 28 million. As he put it, the reason is the close supervision of the “competent authorities” throughout the visit. This includes customs and passport control at the border checkpoint along with the visa registration rigmarole at the place of stay. Often, such formalities (except unexpected legal and not quite legal duties imposed) take between a couple of hours and several days. Visiting tourists and businessmen have an additional headache getting registered at their destinations: visa registration application, statement by the receiving side, photos, and ID reference in lieu of passport. In a word, red tape kept in the best traditions of the old regime.
The situation changed on July 1, with the president signing an order On Additional Measures to Exercise Human Right to the Freedom of Movement and Free Choice of Place of Residence. Now visiting foreign nationals are registered only at the border checkpoint.
The colonel general stressed that the enactment has brought Ukrainian legislation closer to the European Union standard and enhanced Ukraine’s international prestige. The new registration procedures make the visiting foreigners’ life much easier, as evidenced by the tourist influx rising five to six times as of July 1. At present, in order to register, a foreign visitor must produce a passport with a Ukrainian visa at the border checkpoint. Pavlo Shysholyn, deputy commander of the border guard troops, says the registration stamp is affixed for the duration of the visa, and in the case of citizens of countries not requiring visas, the passport is stamped once every ninety days. Now foreign nationals with valid visas, legally entering Ukraine and having their passports stamped at the border, are reliably protected from the visa authority bureaucrats. Foreign Ministry officials have no right to detain foreign nationals with registration stamps in their passports, unless they breach the rules of stay in Ukraine. At the same time, the old registration procedures still apply to foreigners entering Ukraine for permanent residence.
The border guard troop command believes that the registration of visiting foreigners by border guard authorities is quite justified. Last year, the Internal Affairs Ministry registered 600,000 out of 12 million such visitors. Now we can keep all entering and exiting foreigners under control, which is very important in combating illegal migration, said Gen. Oleksiyenko, because all passport data will be entered in a data-processing system to be completed before 2003. Also, the availability of such a computer system to Derzhkomkordon will help detect all those “students” and “businessmen” visiting Ukraine in order to flee to the West.
Great expectations, but there are problems, of course. Border checkpoint registration will be free of charge, meaning no budget returns, while issuing some 50 million registration cards a year to be filled in by visiting foreigners costs. For this reason, the problem of illegal migration will be dealt with not by making the life of all visitors difficult, but by bringing all the relevant authorities into conformity with European standards.
