| AsylumSupport.info | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
AsylumSupport.info
Resources
White Paper Responses: Asylum Aid
Further statement by Asylum Aid on changes to the asylum system announced by the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, 29th October 2001
Outline
On 29th October 2001, the Home Secretary announced a range of what he called ‘radical’ reforms to the asylum system in the UK. Most fundamentally, he aims, over time, to replace the system by which asylum seekers are dispersed into local communities and benefits are administered largely through vouchers with a ‘three-tier’ system of holding centres: induction centres for the newly arrived; accommodation centres where asylum seekers would live (compulsorily, but apparently not behind bars) while their cases were decided; and removal centres (seemingly the most closely related to the current detention centres) where people would go when about to be removed from the UK.There are also several other measures, including apparent plans to restrict asylum seekers’ rights of appeal. At present there is little detail of what any of these changes will involve.
Asylum Aid welcomes some of the proposed changes, including the abolition of vouchers, the expansion of funding for legal advice, and the increase in the number of refugees accepted from third countries through UNHCR.
However, we already have numerous major concerns and are far from convinced that these changes will improve the asylum system (however improvement is measured), or that they will work in practice. Nor in fact do we think that the changes proposed are sufficiently radical, given the huge problems facing refugees in the UK.
Taken as a whole, we believe that the package of measures amounts to yet another assault on the rights of asylum-seekers, one which is once again based on prejudice rather than fact or research. It does nothing to tackle the very serious underlying problems of the asylum system, which relate not so much to the way in which asylum seekers are supported and accommodated (important though that is) but to the appalling standard of decision-making on asylum claims and to the unacceptable number of wrongful refusals of asylum.
The need for fresh legislation
Whilst we are glad to see the back of vouchers, which have been humiliating for asylum seekers and represent a colossal waste of public money, we consider that the worst thing the government can do now is rush into new legislation without time for reflection and consultation.Asylum seekers have suffered a decade of constant changes to the way in which their claims are assessed and, above all, to the way in which they are supported and accommodated. Most of the 1999 Act has been in force for little over twelve months – some of it, in particular the part relating to immigration bail, has never been implemented, even though it was passed by Parliament two years ago. Now yet another set of ‘radical’ changes is being put forward; this demonstrates the long-standing lack of coherent planning and the lamentable failure of successive governments to engage with the real issues concerning forced migration.
The reason each new Act has had to be replaced within a short time is that each has been poorly planned and carelessly drafted, and has been based on the false notion that the way to deal with people fleeing human rights abuses is to exclude them, deter them from coming, or humiliate them.
The Home Secretary now has the opportunity to break this depressing cycle, but only if he is prepared to embark on genuine and open consultation on reform of the asylum system.
The facts
It is important to bear in mind that there is not, and never has been, any evidence that treating asylum applicants harshly has any significant effect on the numbers of people coming to the UK. On the contrary, the current situation on the borders of Afghanistan surely demonstrates that movements of refugees have far more to do with conditions in the countries from which they are fleeing, in particular the incidence of violence and human rights abuses.The fact is that, at a conservative estimate, some 50% of asylum applicants are successful in gaining permission to stay in the UK , even under the harsh and incompetent determination system operating here; many more would be successful if they had access to a fair determination system and independent legal system.
The much-publicised figures which appear to suggest that only a minority of failed asylum seekers are removed from the UK are almost completely worthless, because they do not take account of the number of people who are quite legitimately remaining in the country because they are appealing against rejection; because they have been through the appeals process and have won their appeals; because the Home Office has been persuaded to reconsider their cases; or because they have been allowed to stay on a different basis, for instance after getting married. In other words, many of those whose asylum claims have been refused are not eligible to be removed from the country, and therefore it is meaningless to include them in calculations of what proportion of failed asylum seekers have been removed.
Remarkably, Home Office statistics count people who have been refused initially, but later granted asylum on the basis of a successful appeal, not as successful applicants but as failed applicants. Since around half of those who get asylum in the UK do so as the result of an appeal, having been turned down to start with, this way of miscounting plainly distorts the figures, and therefore distorts the public debate.
The government apparently intends to replace a system based on denial of cash benefits with one based on tight control of individuals so as to ensure their eventual removal. This intention is clearly misplaced if, as we argue, the numbers of people who can be removed is far lower than the Home Office appears to think.
Until the government starts to produce honest asylum statistics, which tell us, for instance, how many people are granted asylum in any given period, including those who were initially rejected, government policy will continue, disgracefully, to be based on statistics which are incomplete or even downright false.
The system by which asylum claims are assessed in the UK is in desperate need of reform, and we urge the government to make this a priority. Far too many asylum seekers are unfairly rejected, or have to fight for years to get their cases taken seriously. Without a fair determination system, any other changes are largely wasted and are doomed to failure.
The government’s plans to take in refugees nominated for resettlement from third countries by UNHCR are important and welcome. However, we are concerned that this should not be a substitute for a fair determination procedure in the UK. Above all, the government must recognise the limits of UNHCR’s ability to give effective protection to people fleeing persecution. There are currently no UNHCR guidelines for how to conduct a determination hearing. This presents particular problems for women asylum seekers, as experiences from around the world suggest that in many cases women’s experience of persecution has remained invisible when processed by UNHCR. Also, unless the issue of women’s protection in camps is tackled and measures are enforced once for all by the UN, their safety will remain at risk even when their asylum claims are accepted.
Such a resettlement programme can never be used as an excuse for denying asylum for people who have bypassed it or been unable to access it, and have come directly to the UK to seek asylum.
Nor does this measure begin to tackle the root causes of enforced migration. International efforts urgently need to be focussed on preventing people from having to flee for their lives in the first place – such as the programme of regeneration which the Foreign Secretary has recently proposed for the future in Afghanistan – rather than on a constant stream of ever-harsher methods aimed at the victims of the international community’s failures. Such efforts should include unconditional protection of women’s rights across geographical and cultural borders.
Asylum Aid fervently hopes that the government will have not only the courage to engage constructively with critics of its policies, but also the vision to implement a system which will treat refugees positively and humanely.
The benefits system
Asylum Aid considers that the system of vouchers and dispersal introduced by the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act has been an unmitigated disaster, and welcomes any moves to revise it. Without accepting that asylum seekers as a whole are motivated by economic considerations, Asylum Aid also agrees that placing an asylum system within the context of a sensible and constructive immigration policy, as the government has been proposing to do in recent months, is a positive development.However, Asylum Aid remains unconvinced that the system of reception centres and smart cards now put forward by the Home Secretary will be a significant improvement on the existing situation.
As far as we are aware, the ‘smart’ cards would either be used by asylum-seekers to draw cash from Post Offices, or would be used as a kind of debit card. This should improve some of the more unacceptable aspects of vouchers, for instance the fact that change cannot be given for purchases of a lesser value than the face value of a voucher, and the stigmatisation and humiliation felt by asylum seekers in using them.
However, the problem is not, and never has been, solely confined to the manner in which benefits are delivered under the current system. There are huge difficulties with the colossal inefficiency of the responsible department of the Home Office, known as NASS (the National Asylum Support Service). NASS has never even begun to meet its targets for the speed at which it should process people’s cases. People have been left for months on so-called ‘emergency’ vouchers and in ‘emergency’ accommodation. Many women and children have been left in a particularly vulnerable situation as a result of this inefficiency, as their specific requirements have too often been overlooked. Those granted asylum are regularly denied the correct documentation and are unable to establish their rights to mainstream benefits after they win their cases. We note that the reception centres, and presumably also the ‘smart’ cards, will be administered by NASS. What depths of bureaucratic ineptitude will be plumbed, if and when NASS takes over responsibility for a system in which benefits are delivered electronically, is almost too frightening to contemplate.
As for the reception centres, without clear details of how these are to operate or what facilities will be available, it is not possible to make a definitive judgement. However, as we have indicated, the way NASS has operated to date gives us no confidence that the reception centres will be run in a competent and humane way.
In addition, Asylum Aid believes that dispersal failed in part because it was seen by asylum-seekers, and intended by the government, as a punitive or deterrent measure, and considers that reception centres risk failing for the same reasons. There is no reason why any positive benefits which may be foreseen for reception centres, such as access to legal advice, cannot be available to asylum seekers living in the community. Nor is there any need to confine asylum seekers in detention or reception centres in order to determine their claims for asylum both fairly and speedily. There must also be great concern that asylum seekers in reception centres will be less able to access the already limited but crucial specialist advice such as psychotherapy or trauma counselling.
Asylum Aid is concerned that reception centres will at best increase the social exclusion of asylum seekers, hindering the recuperation of victims of torture and human rights abuses, and preventing the constructive involvement of all refugees in the community, and at worst will represent a massive and unjustified assault on people’s liberty.
The government claims to be concerned about improving the integration of refugees into the community (even if the precise terms of this have not been spelled out). However, the government appears not to see the contradiction between excluding asylum seekers from the community, and treating them effectively as suspected immigration offenders, up to the point where they are granted refugee status, and then trying to integrate them after that.
If the government persists in seeing asylum seekers as people awaiting removal from the UK, and not, as they should, as people awaiting settlement, it has little hope of bringing about a meaningful integration policy.
The determination system
We remain convinced that the Home Office has to give its urgent attention to improving its decision-making on asylum claims. Although some reforms have been introduced recently, decisions still frequently display an appalling level of insensitivity, bias and ignorance. All the criticisms made in our report on the subject, Still No Reason At All (updated 1999), which contains numerous examples of bad decisions, remain valid.There is an almost complete absence of proper training, staff supervision and internal quality control within the Home Office. Decisions are made by relatively inexperienced officials with little understanding of the countries or cultures from which asylum seekers come, and even a lack of grasp of the human rights issues at stake, and little attempt is made to ensure that the resulting decisions are checked by more senior or experienced staff . There is a complete lack of personal responsibility within the Home Office: asylum seekers’ files are moved from official to official on a regular basis, and no-one oversees the handling of a case from start to finish. Decision-making officials never have to defend their decisions to Appeals Adjudicators, nor do they have anything to do with removing the people affected from the UK; these tasks are the responsibility, respectively, of Presenting Officers and Immigration Officers, who have played no part in the making of the initial decision.
This lack of accountability is exacerbated by a culture of suspicion within the Home Office which seems to lead officials to doubt everything said by asylum seekers, and to regard the process of determining an asylum claim not so much as a process of open-minded assessment than as a process of finding reasons to disbelieve the applicant. Decisions are often based on incorrect information about the countries applicants have fled from, and on a depressing failure by officials even to try to understand how people might behave when in fear of their lives.In addition, Home Office decisions very often reflect a lack of understanding of protection issues in relation to women fleeing persecution. Gender issues are often especially difficult to document (evidence is not always readily available, e.g. in rape cases) and particular efforts should be made to ensure a fair determination of such cases.
It is vital that the Home Office should adopt Gender Guidelines for the determination of asylum claims by women, along the lines of those drawn up by the Refugee Women’s Legal Group and by the Immigration Appellate Authority.
The Home Office must urgently review the information available to decision-making officials, and the processes by which this is gathered. Only information which has been compiled, or at least vetted, by independent experts ought to be used, and further thought must be given to establishing an authoritative independent documentation centre, accessible to all concerned with asylum determination procedures, as has been recommended by refugee organisations for several years.
The Home Secretary and Lord Chancellor have also announced their intention to ‘streamline’ applicants’ rights to appeal against refusal of asylum. By ‘streamline’ we understand ‘restrict’. This includes the intention to expand ‘certification’, which is a procedure by which the Home Office can prevent a further appeal to the Immigration Appeal Tribunal by someone who loses their initial appeal to an Appeals Adjudicator .
We are already opposed to the use of certification and believe that its expansion is precisely the kind of tinkering with the system which the Home Secretary claims he wants to avoid. The Immigration Appeal Tribunal plays a vital role in supervising Adjudicators and ensuring that the law is applied with some degree of consistency. Restricting the power of the Tribunal to do this will lead to an increase in unfairness and inconsistency.
This is particularly problematic given the Lord Chancellor’s intention to appoint a large number of new Adjudicators to consider appeals against refusal of asylum. Adjudicators receive little specific training to do their job, and whilst there are many who do a difficult job with sensitivity and even-handedness, there are, regrettably, many more who are in urgent need of the guidance and restraint which the Tribunal can provide.
The alternative is that more and more applicants, deprived of the right to appeal to the Tribunal, will lodge judicial reviews in the High Court, a more expensive and time-consuming procedure. The government has said it wants to minimise the use of judicial review, but its new proposals are likely to increase it.
We therefore believe that the government needs to strengthen, and not weaken, the safeguards against wrongful refusal of asylum, and should abandon plans to increase certification; on the contrary, certification should be abolished completely.
We further note the intention of the government ‘to minimise the scope for the use of adjournments to create delay’ in the appeals system. As measures to do this already exist, we are concerned that this actually means pushing people with excessive speed through the appeals system, without allowing them time to prepare evidence or find proper legal representation. We believe that it is essential to find the proper balance between avoiding delay and ensuring justice. This will not be possible unless people are given early access to expert legal advice and unless, as explained above, the decision making process improves; on the contrary, justice and speed in asylum procedures go hand in hand.
Much of the delay is created by the Home Office anyway, which rarely processes the papers for appeals in good time, and then loses files or fails to prepare adequately for hearings. There appears to be nothing in the government’s announcement which would tackle this problem, and instead the blame for delays in the appeals system is implicitly, and wrongly, placed on the asylum seekers themselves.
For further information on Asylum Aid’s activities and concerns, please contact info@asylumaid.org.uk or phone 020 7377 5123.