Up to now a refugee yemeni could buy a plane ticket to a third country and take advantage of the stopover in Spain to apply for asylum at a border post. This route has finished. Since January 1, the Government requires a transit visa for the citizens of the arab nation who want to formalize the procedure in the Spanish airports. Yemen is immersed in a civil war that already lasts for five years and has caused more than 200,000 dead, according to the UN, and a wave of refugees. In the European Union, only the Czech Republic, very restrictive with immigration, it has implemented a measure such as the Spanish.

The Spanish Commission for Refugee Aid (CEAR) complained that the new requirement will force the yemeni nationals who seek asylum in Spain, to risk one's life in other alternative routes to get to national territory, such as jump the fence of Melilla or to cross in a boat across the Mediterranean. For Elena Muñoz, head of the legal service of CEAR in Madrid, these pathways are “more dangerous and difficult”, so that the decision of the Executive would be preventing, in practice, applications for asylum. “It is contradictory that the Government itself considered that the people yemenis are worthy of protection imposed a further obstacle to access to that protection,” he says by phone.

this is Not the first time that Spain takes a similar decision. In 2018, the Ministry of Foreign affairs demanded an airport transit visa to the palestinian refugees, which led to a decrease of asylum applications. Last year, HAVING attended to 166 claimants yemenis at the airport of Barajas.