Can a visitor with tourist visa apply for (and potentially be granted) asylum at the Swiss airports? or is it completely impossible? does it change anything if that person comes through a country member of the Schengen by land?
The brother of a friend is in a desperate state and wants to leave Cuba asap. My friend is Cuban and has Swiss citizenship. However, he can't claim reunification with his brother in Cuba as only mother, father or children fall under the family reunification claim.
Through another member state by land - no, as this is against Dublin convention. If he come to Switzerland, he will be send back to the country of entry. Yes, he can apply at the border, but based on the above it will be later rejected.
Well for intra-Schengen flights there is no immigration control at the airports.
The applicant will have to seek them out, and they are going to ask why refugee status wasn’t claimed at the first point of arrival in Schengen. They could just put them on the next flight back.
Is Cuba considered a country from which refugee claims are usually accepted by Switzerland?
I spent a fair amount of time with asylum seekers coming into Switzerland 2015-2016. Most of them came in via land routes. They were fingerprinted and checked against database. If they were not on the database, regardless of the countries they'd passed through, they were registered and processed in Switzerland.
On entry to the Dublin Area, they're supposed to be fingerprinted immediately, but it doesn't always happen.
If they were on that database, then they risked being sent back. This did not always happen as within the Dublin agreement countries can allow the asylum seeker to be registered with them, regardless of previous registration, and furthermore the original country must agree to the return of the seeker.
Routinely people were arrested and deported to the country of first registration, but not all by any means. Having a relative who is legally in the country can help.
Purely hypothetically though, a direct flight from outside the Dublin Area to Switzerland would seem the safest option for any asylum seeker.
We too have looked after refugees over last few years. If I had one piece of advice it would be to decide on their story, as truthful as possible, and stick with it. Embellishments or additional details added at subsequent interviews only raises suspicion and further probing.
We know a Kurdish - Iranian refugee that was ultimately refused permanent residency apparently because they didn’t believe his ever changing story. He wasn’t deported but he is in limbo with a Permis F.