After years of being apart, Yonas and his family can finally start rebuilding their lives together in safety.

Family reunification in the country of asylum is crucial for refugees to rebuild their lives. It is also an important safe and legal pathway of admission. Family unity and family life is a fundamental human right. UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, works to advocate for fast, flexible and efficient procedures allowing refugees to reunite, so families can be together. If family reunification is made more straightforward, fewer family members would have to resort to dangerous journeys, relying instead on safe and legal routes to join their loved ones.

Meet Yonas, from Eritrea, and his wife Tsega and son Essey, who were reunited in Belgium after four long and difficult years of being apart.

Imagine being separated from your family and loved ones for years on end

This was the case for Yonas and his family who, along their journey to seek safety, were separated for more than four years.

“For four years, I kept thinking about them constantly. I had many sleepless nights during those years.” - Yonas

Yonas and his wife Tsega’s ordeal started in 2016, when they and their young son Essey fled persecution and violence in Eritrea to seek asylum in Europe. While travelling through Libya, they were violently separated by human traffickers. Fortunately, UNHCR managed to evacuate Yonas in 2017 through the Emergency Transit Mechanism (ETM), a programme co-funded by the European Union to evacuate vulnerable refugees and asylum seekers from Libya to Niger. One year later, in 2018, he was resettled to Belgium where he was recognized as a refugee.

It took Yonas almost two years to trace his wife and son. With the help of the Red-Cross, they were eventually found in a detention centre in Tripoli, Libya. It turned out that they had been abducted and sold several times. In December 2020, Tsega and her son were evacuated through the ETM in Rwanda where they were supported to complete pending steps towards their family reunification process. In March 2021, after four long years of separation, the family was finally reunited in Belgium.

“I was so happy and excited when I saw Yonas at the airport. I thought we’d never see each other again. At times, it feels like a dream.” - Tsega

Family reunification - a challenging process with many obstacles

“I was very moved by Yonas's story and his integrity. All the horror that Yonas had experienced and the situation in which his wife and child found themselves at that time, was something that touched me deeply,” says Ilse Uyttenhove from CAW (Centrum Algemeen Welzijnswerk) Oost-Brabant, a centre for social well-being that provides accessible and quality aid to vulnerable people.

“Managing expectations of families is difficult as the family reunification procedures are often very long, sometimes many years, with long waiting periods in between receiving information from the embassies on their application. So, families grow restless and start to consider alternatives such as travel by sea,” says Danielle Beasley, a UNHCR Child Protection Officer for the Office of the Special Envoy for the Central Mediterranean Situation.*

Fortunately for Yonas and his family, he and Ilse were able to count on the support of Myria, the Belgian Federal Migration Centre which is UNHCR’s implementing partner for family reunification in Belgium who worked to ensure the necessary information and documents were obtained within the tight timeframe.

 “Not applying strict deadlines and introducing more flexible ways of submitting applications are two key areas of attention for policy- makers and institutions to ensure effective access to family reunification for refugees”, underlines Koen Dewulf, the Director at Myria. “In a context of strict deadlines, these are the only approaches to avoid dangerous and costly journeys to visa application centers.”

To overcome the many obstacles during what is too often a lengthy and complex process, Myria worked with a number of local and international actors. These included the Belgian Immigration Office and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, CAW and UNHCR Tripoli, Kigali and Brussels.

Reunited at last

One of the last challenges Yonas and his family had to overcome before being reunited, was to find a way to raise money for the tickets to Belgium. UNHCR’s operation in Kigali reached out to Miles4Migrants (M4M), a US-based organization that helps forcibly displaced families in need of support with one-way plane tickets. By using donated frequent flyer miles, M4M assisted Yonas’ wife and child with flight arrangements to Belgium.

Yonas, Tsega and Essey were reunited at last.

“I was so happy when I saw Yonas at the airport. I thought we were never going to see each other again. Sometimes it feels like a dream.” – Tsega

The family now lives together in Kortrijk, a city in the North of Belgium. Essey is very excited to go to school in Belgium and start learning Dutch.

Even though some challenges still lie ahead, and further support and guidance will be needed, the family is finally reunited and can look forward to a brighter future. Because families belong together.

* The office oversees the UNHCR Central Mediterranean Family Reunification Project, which deploys RefugePoint Family Reunification Experts to assist families, such as Yonas’s wife and child, with their family reunification procedures while in Libya and other locations along the Central Mediterranean route.