Werede, Hiwet and Kokob

8 years had to pass before Werede and Hiwet obtained permission to be reunited as a married couple. “I am very grateful,” says Werede about the help he received from Refugees Welcome during a time span of more than 6 years of applications and rejections. “I might have given up without it.”
 
Here is their story:
Werede and Hiwet became a couple in 2013 and married in Eritrea in 2014. Just two months after moving in together, Werede was called up for military service and had to flee. He arrived in Denmark in the autumn of 2014 and was granted asylum in 2015. Shortly afterwards, he applied for family reunification with Hiwet.
 
Like so many others, their application was rejected because they had only submitted the church marriage certificate and not the civil certificate required by the Danish authorities – which in fact no one has. Because Werede had had to flee to avoid being drafted into the military, the couple had not lived together for long enough to qualify for family reunification on the basis of cohabitation.
 
Refugees Welcome appealed to the Immigration Appeals Board, but it was rejected. At the same time, Hiwet also fled from Eritrea, and Werede visited her several times, first in Sudan and later in Ethiopia. Together they had a daughter, Kokob, who was born in the summer of 2018.
 
Werede applied several additional times to bring his family to Denmark but was rejected on every occasion – even when he had managed to obtain a civil certificate from his family in Eritrea. In Ethiopia in 2020, Werede and Hiwet had their marriage confirmed and were also married according to Ethiopian law. However, due to Covid-19, the marriage office was closed for a long period of time meaning that, when Hiwet finally received the marriage certificate, a new administrative date had been provided, not the actual date on which the couple had been married. The Danish Immigration Service therefore rejected the marriage as it was clear that Werede had not been in Ethiopia on the date the certificate was issued.
 
Hiwet went to the Ethiopian office with the Danish rejection, and they agreed to issue a new certificate, backdated to the day the wedding had actually taken place – before the Covid-19 shutdown. Refugees Welcome helped again with a new application, and this time a result was achieved quickly: permission was received after only 4 months!
 
One Monday evening in September 2022, Hiwet and Kokob landed at Aalborg Airport. The couple had been forced to live apart since Werede had fled Eritrea 8 years before and, during her 4-year-long life, Kokob had only met her father the few times he was able to visit.