International refugee movements - out of control

The word "Asylum" comes from the Greek, and describes a place of refuge where a man could escape from the reach of the power of the state. Traditionally, the place of asylum was the temple. However, if the person who had sought refuge in the holy place had committed a blatant crime, he would be denied food and water to compel him to leave the place of worship, which then enabled the temporal power to lay hand on him.

Thus, since its very origin, the corollary of asylum was its management. Three thousand years later, the problem is unchanged: Asylum without management leads or abuse, which in turn leads to the erosion of the principal. To preserve the principal requires that it be managed. The problem is how.

Three questions have to be addressed in managing asylum: who is a refugee; where should they seek asylum; and for how long?

A Refugee is defined by persecution for political or religious reasons, or for belonging to a specific social group. Someone seeking asylum is by definition an asylum-seeker. If a person’s claim conforms to the definition of a refugee, they are recognised as such. If it does not conform, they are not. There is therefore no such thing as a ‘bogus refugee’. One either is a refugee or not.

Global movement

Traditionally, refugees sought asylum within their own cultural or geographic environment with the ultimate aim of returning home when the danger for them was over.

The first major exception to this occurred during the Vietnamese refugee exodus. While some 300,000 Cambodian refugees waited for up to fourteen years in camps in Thailand for the situation in their home country to change to permit their safe repatriation, until 1989 all Vietnamese boat people were automatically resettled in developed countries.

What started as a unique case in the 1980s became a generalised phenomenon in the 1990s. Ease of transportation, the global revolution in communications, the enduring economic crisis of the third world, combined with protracted internal conflicts and social upheavals, have led to a globalisation of population displacement.

A combined mass if refugees, asylum-seekers ad illegal migrants has been converging on western Europe in the quest foe an economic El Dorado. And more often than not, the purpose is not so much to leave as it is to arrive. There are two constant factors: first asylum-seekers-cum-migrants move towards countries where they can join an existing community of compatriots. This is a pall factor which means that Tamils will go principally to Switzerland, Canada Britain; Kosovars will mostly head for Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

Convenience

Second, the population flux will converge towards those countries that provide the more generous social benefits or the best living conditions. It is generally understood that personal safety is the prime concern of refugees and that they should seek asylum in the first country where they would be out of harm’s way. In practice, this is hardly ever the case.

The illegal arrival in Britain of a Kurd who has travelled through Greece, Italy and France can have many motivations, but the need for protection is not one of them. Likewise, the Tamil who arrives in Switzerland after journeying through India, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Germany can hardly claim that it was impossible to claim asylum in any of these countries. Personal convenience takes precedence over protection and what might initially have been a quest for refuge becomes more often than not a an asylum-shopping spree. While the phenomenon is understandable, when multiplied by the hundreds and thousands, it becomes unbearable for the few countries that end up with a disproportionate burden of arrivals.

Fear of Persecution

Current asylum procedure is based on the Convention on Refugees, drafted by Western governments in 1951 in the context of population displacements following World War Two. The Convention spells out two basic principals. It defines an refugee as someone who has a well founded fear of persecution for political or religious reasons or for belonging to a specific social group. It provides that the person concerned should not be returned to a country or area where they would be in danger.

Based on these principals, western European governments established national procedures through which an asylum-seeker can claim refugee status. By and large these procedures have been exceedingly generous. Not only do they provide social benefits for those waiting for a decision on their status, but they also include complex safeguards to ensure that no genuine asylum-seeker is denied refugee status. This was put in place when the overwhelming majority of asylum-seekers were bona fide refugees. Half a century later there is a massive and complex influx composed of a minority of refugees needing asylum intermingled either with refugees who seek to migrate or with migrants pretending to be refugees.

Collapsing

In the late 1980s, when asylum requests began to increase and recognition rates plummeted, western European governments began to realise that their systems were collapsing under their own weight. In 1983 the total number of asylum-seekers in western Europe was a manageable 73,700. In 1992 it peaked at 692,000 to fall back to 347,000 in 1998.

The distribution of arrivals by country also changed. In 1983, 4300 asylum requests were made in Britain and 3000 in Italy. Last year Britain received some 70,000 requests while applications in Italy fell to 681 in 1996.

Italy is a case in point. With an uncontrollable coastline, the country receives an estimated 150,000 illegal migrants a year. Hardly any, apply for refugee status because the benefits are so meagre and most prefer to move on and ask for asylum elsewhere in Europe, or to stay and work illegally, a situation the authorities have chosen to tolerate. Only in 1998, when Italy threatened to start deporting illegal immigrants, did asylum requests suddenly climb to 6930. They are projected at some 10,000 this year.

Delaying

With the 1951 Convention providing that a person may not be deported to his country of origin, it became a matter of course for all illegal immigrants to claim refugee status, to stave off, or at least to delay, a repatriation. A typical example might be an Albanian who left illegally for Italy in 1998, bought false Italian papers, moved on to Germany to work, was identified as an Albanian and shortly before deportation applied for refugee status.

While hie request is certain to be turned down, the combination of a good lawyer and a vocal advocacy group will ensure that his stay in Germany is prolonged by at least three years, during which both receive some social benefits and work illegally.

The combination of massive arrivals and procedural abuses resulted in the mechanism being both overwhelmed by numbers and turned into an endless labyrinth of litigation, delaying tactics and appeals. It soon took years for a case to be decided.

In some instances, governments facing labour shortages tried to short-circuit immigration legislation by being overly generous in granting refugee status, until the system backfired by drawing in even more asylum requests. Up to 95 per cent of the refugee claims proved bogus, and asylum-seekers presenting multiple claims in successive countries under false names further compounded the problem. When a claim was finally adjudicated negatively, in more cases than not deportation was impossible, either because the country of origin refused to take back its citizen, or because the applicants had destroyed all documents and no claim for nationality could be legally made.

Skyrocketing cost

The end result of disarray in the western European asylum system is skyrocketing budgets. It is estimated that from 1990 to 1998 asylum-seekers cost the European receiving countries between $40 and 45 billion. This year the cost is projected at $10 billion. While this is expensive by any standard, it is one thing to spend quite large sums of money to care for refugees and quite another if the overwhelming majority of arrivals are not in genuine need of asylum. Indeed, of the 2.4 million asylum claims filed in Europe from 1991 to 1995 hardly 10 per cent were found to be refugees under the terms of the 1951 Convention.

In the late 1980s, confronted with a crisis that showed no sign of abating, western European governments reluctantly acknowledged that the issue could simply no longer be addressed by individual countries acting independently. The only realistic solution lay in new, comprehensive asylum arrangements. While the process took time to gel, the setting up of a common asylum policy has now become a top European Union priority.

Preserving Principle

The new arrangements, now in the making, have two fundamental components. The first is to preserve the principal of asylum by curbing the abuses, which are causing it to collapse under its own weight. The second is to unlink asylum and migration issues so that each can be addressed in its own right. Both these issues are the exclusive prerogatives of democratically elected European governments. And while the 1951 Conventions are the starting point, Europe has already moved further, through the convention against torture and adding humanitarian status as an additional reason for asylum.

Temporary Protection

The idea of permanent, a opposed to temporary, asylum was a product of the Cold War. If not abandoned, it has now been at least curtailed, especially in regard to mass exodus. Following the Bosnian crisis European governments offered temporary protection. In a amass exodus from an area of conflict there would no longer be a costly and convoluted individual refugees determination procedure, but a whole group would automatically be given asylum. It was understood that this was temporary and that repatriation would occur once the acute crisis was over in the country of origin. The approach was also valuable in the 1999 Kosovo crisis, where tens of thousands of Kosovars were given refuge in Europe, to return when the war subsided.

Repatriation, generally voluntary with some integration assistance, is the key to the system. To ensure its success, given economic disparities between the countries of origin and those of asylum, governments must retain the option of deportation. In the right circumstances, with the possibility of subsequent free movement, voluntary or unobjected return is the rule rather than the exception.

While the nature of social benefits granted to asylum seekers is till a source of considerable discussion, suspending them altogether has never been considered. European democracies generally don’t let people starve in the street, whatever their status or origin.

Out of Dander

But governments have tried to be increasingly strict in implementing the principal that a refugee should seek asylum where he is in no danger rather than where it is his personal choice to be. Germany has been returning to the Czech Republic or to Poland third-country asylum seekers coming via those countries and caught on its border. The Dutch have done the same towards Germany, the Swiss towards Italy, the Irish towards Britain. Ultimately, this is only palliative. It transposes the problem without solving it and, as long as asylum-seekers are not in holding centres they will continue to cross borders and many will ultimately succeed.

The ultimate purpose of this policy is to try to separate the granting of asylum from the physical presence of the asylum-seeker on the territory of the receiving country. It is on this principal that the US has been intercepting Cuban boat people on the High seas; if there is a presumption of refugee status the asylum seeker is landed inn Guantanamo for full processing. If the decision is positive they will be given asylum n a Latin American country. If there is no presumption of refugee status, the person is returned the same day to Cuba.

This process in no way contradicts the 1951 Convention because it does ensure that a refugee will receive asylum, but not necessarily where he or she wants. This principal of access to protection without prior admission is at the basis of a multilateral initiative. It would provide that an asylum-seeker coming to Europe via Albania would be returned to a holding centre in that country where he could be screened and then given asylum of found to be a refugee.

On the same lines, Switzerland and Austria have provisions that enable an asylum-seeker to present a request at one of their Embassies abroad. Ultimately, however, Europe will have no alternative but to decide that asylum requests from citizens of specific countries will simply not be considered.

The problem is compounded by the atmosphere of confrontation, which has developed within the asylum arena. In addition to bona fide non-governmental organisations which are the indispensable partners of national and multinational humanitarian policies, governments now have to contend with a proliferation of self-appointed ‘advocacy groups’. They have political agendas and increasingly use the theme of asylum to challenge the system.

Democracies that developed the 1951concvention and extended its scope and have, perhaps unskillfully, created procedures undoubtedly over-complicated but with the ultimate aim of ensuring that no rfugee be denied asylum, are portrayed as enemies of refugees.

Migration and Removal

As the European Union moves closer to a common asylum system, two fundamental issues will have to be addressed. The first is removal. There can be no credible asylum policy without the repatriation of those who are not at risk and there fore are not refugees. A common and extremely forceful position is necessary for asylum-seeker source countries that refuse to take back their own nationals.

The second is the migration issue. Given current demographic patterns, Europe cannot sustain its present level of developments without immigration. Largely unacknowledged, such immigration has been going on for years, albeit in the form of guest-workers in Germany and the like. Granting asylum is a moral imperative, accepting immigrants is a response to an economic need.

Migrant, properly selected, bring skills. Refugees flee persecution. And while there might be some minor overlap between the two, the contention that by expanding immigration quotas the number of fraudulent asylum claims can be significantly reduced as for all practical purposes false.

European democracies have done pretty well over the past two decades in facing successive refugee-cum-migrant crises. The costs were massive and new procedures were often overtaken by events even before they were implemented. But by and large the cases of refugees being denied asylum were few and far between and when such cases did occur the cause was human error and not government policy. If Europe’s record is to be the benchmark by which the new European Asylum arrangements will be judged, refugees have nothing to fear.