In a small room with a low ceiling and rows of benches, people are crowded together. It smells of instant coffee from a machine in the corner, and also of stress and anxiety. Those gathered keep glancing at the board with red numbers that periodically change with a monotonous sound—waiting for the number of their ticket and the number of the coveted window to appear.
As Radio Prague notes, this scene is common in waiting rooms for clients at branches of the Foreign Police of the Czech Republic. Those gathered have one goal: to obtain permission to stay in the country or to extend the validity of an existing document.
A visit to the police station, however, must be “earned”: spending a lot of time trying to get through by phone and make an appointment with an operator, or standing in a multi-hour queue for a number, and then waiting to be seen. And again, the wait takes hours. If the client is refused an extension of their residence permit, the above-described procedure must be repeated over and over until the result is achieved.
According to Czech police data, the majority of foreigners illegally staying in the Czech Republic are Ukrainians—1,456 people. The lists of “lawbreakers” also include Moldovans (825 people), Vietnamese (353 people), Russian citizens (234 people), and Uzbek citizens (199 people). The number of illegal foreigners, police officers report, increased by 685 people compared to 2018. The reasons why a foreigner may be denied an extension of a long-term visa vary widely.
“A long-term residence permit is always issued for a specific purpose: study, family reunification, entrepreneurship. One type of long-term residence in the country is also the employee card (zaměstnanecká karta),” says Barbora Machová, an employee of the Center for the Integration of Foreigners (Centrum pro integraci cizinců). “Thus, when applying for a visa, the client must accompany it with documents that correspond to the purpose of their stay. For example, if it is about study, then the package of documents must include a confirmation of enrollment issued by the educational institution. In this case, problems sometimes arise with deadlines: the student changes educational institution or submits documents for extension during the holidays. And, accordingly, cannot provide all the necessary papers on time.”
“The second problem, which primarily concerns students but also other foreigners, is that many of them leave the collection of documents until the last moment. The time period during which documents for visa extension can be submitted is quite long, and it is very important for the Ministry of the Interior that applications are submitted on time. Any personal reasons for not doing so are not taken into account. To put it slightly exaggeratedly, the ministry may accommodate you if you suddenly end up in the hospital dying as a result of an accident. But not when you put off submitting your application until the last week and just at that moment you come down with the flu or your work doesn’t let you go.”
If the application was submitted on time, but for objective reasons the client was unable to provide the full package of required documents, the Ministry of the Interior allows the papers to be submitted later. Often, according to Barbora Machová, the situation is complicated by the bureaucracy inherent in the Czech administrative system.
“This results in a situation where the application for extension of long-term residence is processed for a very long time,” she notes. “By law, the processing time for an application is 60 days, but the Ministry of the Interior does not meet this deadline, and this, unfortunately, is quite common. Therefore, it often happens that the client is asked to supplement or update certain information—precisely because a long time has passed since the application was submitted. For example, one of the documents was a confirmation of income, but ministry employees got around to reviewing the application many months later.”
In such a case, the client will receive an official request called “výzva k odstranění nedostatků.” The deadline for fulfilling the requirements set out in it is 30 days.
“Each such request specifies the deadline within which the client must provide the missing documents. If there is a reason why this cannot be done within that deadline, then the client must inform the ministry of it. In this case, the client writes an official letter asking to extend the above deadline and explains the reasons.”
Example situation: the client could not provide a valid passport because the old document expired and they are waiting for a new document to be ready. The ministry, Machová believes, will most likely accommodate them. Among the documents that may require updating is also the rental contract for housing. As a rule, it is issued to the tenant for a period of one year; accordingly, if the processing of the application drags on, a new version of the document will be needed.
According to Barbora Machová, clients often do not respond promptly to such requests simply because they cannot figure out what exactly is required of them. The natural consequence is a refusal to extend the visa.
“These requests or ‘summonses’ are sometimes formulated so complexly that even we, social service workers, sometimes have difficulty reading this document and understanding what exactly needs to be supplemented. There are also situations where the ministry’s summons does not reach the addressee in time due to the fault of postal workers, but this, according to Barbora Machová, happens extremely rarely. Usually, it happens that the addressee is rarely in the country or frequently changes their place of residence—in this case, the letter may not find its way to them.”
Should a client, in case of refusal to extend permission to stay in the Czech Republic, seek help from a lawyer?
“In many situations, we consider this as one of the options: is it within our competence to solve the problem the client comes to us with, or is it such a complex situation that it is in their best interest to consult a lawyer? I believe that if a client has been refused a visa extension and has a number of strong arguments to file an appeal, they should secure legal support,” notes Barbora Machova.
Although the integration center does not have precise statistics on the number of refusals to extend long-term residence permits in the Czech Republic, the practical experience of staff, according to Barbora Machova, indicates that the number of people seeking help with such a problem has not changed significantly recently.