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870 Market Street
Suite 1028
San Francisco, CA
94102

(415) 391-0228

Klara Ernys-Koffler
Hungarian Refugee from Serbia

by David N. Strand

Klara Ernys-Koffler and attorney David N. Strand at her naturalization oath ceremony

Asylum cases are always fascinating to me. The asylum applicant must convince our government that he or she is unable or unwilling to return to his or her home country because of persecution or a well founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. An understanding and analysis of history, sociology, current political events, and foreign law is often necessary to prepare a successful asylum application. Of the many asylum claims I have handled from all over the world, that of Klara Ernys-Kofler was one of the most fascinating and intellectually challenging.

Like many clients, Klara came to my office because she wanted to stay in the United States. She had entered as a tourist and she had no initially discernable legal path to remain. She was born in Yugoslavia in the province of Vojvodina, which since the dissolution of Yugoslavia, is part of Serbia. She is of Hungarian ethnicity, as were approximately 20% of the populace of Vojvodina.

Eleven years Yugoslavia dissolved into multiple warring factions following the death of Joseph Tito , Klara Ernyes had married a German citizen, moved to Germany, and became a permanent resident of Germany. In Germany she worked for a government organization that provided social services to immigrant workers and refugees. After a divorce she left Germany for America in 1993 and in 1995 came to our office seeking advice.

Persecution of ethnic Hungarians in Serbia was a result of dissolution of the nation of Yugoslavia into several ethnocentric smaller states. Most of these newly independent countries were quickly involved with their neighbors in ferocious military conflict, and within many of them minority peoples fought to assert their own sovereignty. The well known conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina between Catholic Croatians, Orthodox Serbians, and Muslim Bosnians became so intense that NATO and American troops became involved. The more recent separation from Serbia of Kosovo, which had the political backing of the United States and our European allies, is considered one of the reasons that Russia was emboldened to invade Georgia, formerly a small part of the Soviet Union, to help even smaller areas, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, seek independence.

When Serbia and Croatia split both embarked upon ethnic cleansing to rid their newly independent nations those of other ethnicities and religions. The particular event that precipitated the persecution of ethnic Hungarians in the Vojvodina section of Serbia was the expulsion of ethnic Serbs from Krajina, a region of independent Croatia. These displaced Serbs fled from Croatia to Vojvodina, the section of Serbia that borders Croatia. These displaced Serbs had nowhere to live in Vojvodina, so in the increasingly popular practice of ethnic cleansing, they in turn drove the Hungarians from the homes and fields where they had lived for generations. Many Hungarians were ousted at gunpoint and with terror tactics by Serbs who were driven from Krajina by similar tactics. Great numbers of Hungarians fled Serbia and those that remained were subject to loss of property, deprivation of human rights, and other forms of persecution. These abuses were supported by the government of Serbia under the leadership of President Slobodan Milosovic who recently passed away while on trial in the Hague for genocide.

Our initial research demonstrated clearly that there did exist extensive persecution of Hungarians in Serbia. We collected reports from sources such as Human Rights Watch and the World Refugee Survey, as well as articles from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, all of which demonstrated the tragic ferocity of the treatment of the Hungarian minority in Serbia.

There were three major hurdles we had to overcome.

The first was that Klara never suffered persecution herself. Typically asylum applicants demonstrate how they themselves have suffered persecution in the country form which they seek refuge. Klara, however, had left Vojvodina in 1979, eleven years before the breakup of Yugoslavia. The persecution of Hungarians in Vojvodina occurred in 1994 and 1995, approximately fifteen years after she moved to Germany.

The second issue was overcoming the restriction on granting asylum to those who have firmly resettled in another country. Klara had become a permanent resident of Germany as s result of her marriage to a German citizen, where she lived for fourteen years.

The third issue was that asylum applicants are expected to apply in the first country where they see refuge, and although Klara lived for fourteen years in Germany, she never applied for asylum.

The first issue, the fact that Klara herself had never suffered from persecution, was overcome by showing that she had a fear of persecution in Serbia if she were forced to return at the time she filed for asylum. It did not matter that she had never suffered persecution during the thirty years that she lived there. Her asylum application was filed in 1997, and we were able to demonstrate that she faced a strong likelihood of persecution at that time because of the repression of Hungarians that started in 1994.

We overcame the prohibition on granting asylum to those who were firmly resettled in a third country by citing a provision of the German immigration law that mandates that a permanent resident of Germany who remains out of Germany for over six months abandons his or her status and does not have the right to return to Germany. Although the German law provides a procedure for recovering permanent residence status after a six month absence, at the time Klara applied for asylum she did not have the right to return to Germany where she had lived for fourteen years.

We were able to overcome her failure to apply for asylum in Germany by demonstrating that the conditions that precipitated persecution of ethnic Hungarians did not exist prior to her leaving Germany in 1993. She was already in the United States when Croatia began to force ethnic Serbians back to Serbia, which resulted in the displacement of ethnic Hungarians from their homes in Vojvodina. Thus, we demonstrated that Klara had no asylum claim when she resided in Germany and that her fear of persecution developed only after she had entered the United States.

Klara Ernyes-Kofler was granted asylum in the United States. In September 2008 she became a United States citizen. I attended her oath ceremony where she naturalized with 1455 others from 101 countries. She continues to pursue a career in social services, having worked in the San Francisco Bay Area for organizations such as the International Rescue Committee, Survivors International and the Bosnia Refugee Health Program of the Jewish Family and Children’s Service.