Population figures
Total country population
10,499,000
Forcibly displaced population
Refugees (under UNHCR's mandate):
11,033
Asylum-seekers:
2,120
IDPs (of concern to UNHCR):
0
Other people in need of international protection:
0
Other
Statelessness persons
3,629
Host community
0
Others of concern to UNHCR
0
Country context
Tajikistan is a landlocked Central Asian republic bounded by Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to the north and west, China to the east, and Afghanistan to the south. Tajikistan hosts a refugee population that originates predominantly from neighbouring Afghanistan. The situation in Afghanistan and the Taliban’ s takeover of power resulted in the arrival of more than 5,700 asylum-seekers to Tajikistan since January 2021.
Recent reports indicate instances of returns without procedural safeguards, underscoring ongoing challenges in upholding non-refoulement obligations. Refugees and asylum-seekers reside mainly in urban and peri-urban host communities around Dushanbe and Khujand in North, in districts such as Vahdat, Rudaki, Hissor, and Jabbor Rasulov integrating into housing markets and accessing public services under their refugee certificates rather than in dedicated camps.
...The Law on Refugees No.50 of 10 May 2002 (with latest amendments - No. 1124 of 26 July 2014) establishes the domestic framework for asylum, defining grounds and procedures for refugee recognition in accordance with the 1951 Convention and its 1967 Protocol, providing for provisional asylum-seeker certificates, status-determination interviews, and refugee certificates that confer rights to residence, work and social safeguards. Confidentiality of application data and exemptions from penalties for irregular entry are enshrined in Law on refugees and in implementing regulations, which also assign responsibility for refugee-status determination to a Joint permanent commission for refugee status determination under the internal affairs which also includes representatives from relevant ministries.
The Criminal Code does provide for penalties for illegal border crossings; however, it makes an exception for individuals seeking political asylum. In practice, this has led to the problematic and punitive criminal prosecution of asylum-seekers for irregular entry, a situation further exacerbated by the absence of an effective referral mechanism at the border.
Statelessness prevention has progressed through both statutory and administrative measures. An Amnesty Law adopted in December 2019 regularized the stay of former USSR-era citizens and stateless persons and facilitated their acquisition of Tajik citizenship. Earlier, the 2015 Citizenship Act introduced gender-neutral transmission of nationality and streamlined provisions for naturalization, embedding mechanisms to reduce future statelessness. Despite these advances, no dedicated procedure yet exists to identify and determine stateless status under domestic law; individuals without nationality instead receive temporary residence permits under general migration rules. Stateless individuals, while few, live dispersed in similar urban settings, holding temporary identity documents under the Aliens Act without specialized protections.
There is no standalone legal instrument for internally displaced persons. Displacements caused by natural hazards—such as floods and landslides—or by development projects are managed through emergency regulations and civil-law compensation schemes, leaving internally uprooted persons reliant on ad hoc relief and local administrative practices rather than a codified IDP status framework.
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