Sensible Suggestions On Asylum?

Mary Dejevsky in the ‘Indy’, raises some very good points on the asylum process.

Unfortunately, she was a bit hasty with her preamble:

The image of three young Kosovans, found dead, roped together, at the foot of a Glasgow high-rise, deserves to go down in the annals of British shame alongside the pictures of the Chinese cockle-pickers who drowned in Morecambe Bay.

Ummm, actually, Mary, they appear to have been Russians. And not all young, either.

And they appear to have come here from Canada

In both cases, people from benighted parts of the world were misled into believing they would find a land of opportunity, if not milk and honey, when what they actually entered was a land of absent authority, incapable of either protecting them or acting on difficult decisions.

Canada’s a benighted part of the world now?

And it appears that it’s the fact that they disagreed with the decisions made in Canada that prompted their wanderings.

Still, the rest of the points are certainly good ones:

Now there are two standard responses to such events. From the liberal left, you will hear pleas for greater tolerance and humanity towards pretty much anyone who wants to come to Britain to work to improve their lot. On the right you will hear arguments for more restrictions on immigration across the board, plus a further tightening of border controls and asylum procedures.

Well, it’s no surprise that most people would come down on the side of the latter, while most of those making the decisions and the noise in the press would come down on the side of the former.

What is heard all too rarely, though, is any plea for the laws as they stand to be properly applied, with clarity and competence.

Actually, no, there’s a lot of that on blogs – and not just with asylum law either, but ALL laws…

The policy of dispersal was designed to lift some of the cost from London and the South-east. But exiling asylum-seekers to condemned estates in Glasgow and elsewhere also had the – surely not unwelcome – side-effect of placing Kosovans, Somalis, Tamils and others out of sight, and so out of the popular mind.

No, merely placing them out of the sight of the metropolitan elite that makes most of the decisions, Scotland’s hinterlands being a far-off country of which they know little...

Now, I know well, not least from my familiarity with Soviet-era dissidents, that asylum claims can be complex and, where war zones are concerned, the complexities multiply. But it still seems to me that several changes need to be made, without any need to change the law.

And they are?

The first is a narrowing of the practical definition of asylum, as applied by the UK. No country can admit everyone who claims a justified fear of persecution. Perhaps some of the campaigners who believe Britain is too mean might sponsor the legal settlement of those they believe to be hard done by, rather than encouraging their eternal, taxpayer-funded, appeals.

It sounds like a nice idea, but isn’t the definition of an asylum seeker not governed by the UK anyway? Isn’t it based on the 1951 UN Convention's definition of a refugee?

I can’t see how we could go about changing that.

The second is the abbreviation of that same appeals process. Better advice for new arrivals would reduce the number of justified appeals. Only a minority succeed even then, but one success encourages others to try and the process can go on for years.

I’m all for shortening the appeal process, but again, is that within our gift? Wouldn’t any attempt to do so be fought (by the activists) through the European courts?

Which is why there needs to be a third change. All who claim asylum should be detained until their case is resolved. A target deadline of a month would concentrate minds on both sides and eliminate the need for "dispersal".

Now, this is certainly down to us. This is something we can do.

It will, however, be horrendously expensive and attract fierce opposition from the open borders bunch.

At present, cases take so long that, even though the majority are refused, it is by then at least as cruel to threaten deportation as it would have been to deny asylum at the start.

Except the activists would then claim that we are too hasty, and so are not judging cases correctly.

Really, isn’t the answer to stop paying attention to these activists in the first place? They will never be satisfied, no matter what…

Such summary justice would inevitably draw protest. But would it be any less humane than what passes for an asylum system now?

No, it would be far more humane.

But it still wouldn’t necessarily prevent cases like the one everyone’s shroud-waving about at the moment.