Paper Title
Regulation Gaps of the UNHCR’s Mandate Refugees in Tajikistan: International and Domestic Legal Aspects

Abstract
UNHCR’s unregulated practice of granting refugee and asylum seeker status under its mandate in Tajikistan challenges the sovereignty and fairness of the state jurisdiction. The UN organ acts in parallel with and functions as an alternative to the national refugee protection instrument leading to a degree vulnerability and invisibleness for its alien beneficiaries in the national legal system. As a result, mandate refugees are de facto in a refugee situation, but when viewing under legal lenses, they are not. In comparison with conventional refugees, mandate ones do not have local integration opportunities and cannot benefit from the guaranteed provisions of the national legislation. The purpose of this research is to address ways to overcome the regulation gaps of mandate refugees in Tajikistan. In the light of the upcoming security issues after the withdrawal of the Western troops from Afghanistan, one of the world’s top refugee producing countries, and presence of the Islamic State extremist in its Northern provinces bordering with Tajikistan, it is inevitable that UNHCR’s parallel operating mandate refugee protection program would cease to exist as a sustainable program. Keywords - Conventional Refugees, UNHCR Mandate Refugees, Refugee Status Determination, Refugee Protection Instrument, Complementary Protection.