UK: Asylum Bill
01 January 1992
"There are few circumstances", wrote Peter Lloyd, Minister responsible for Immigration at the Home Office, "in which an intercontinental flight is required to escape the threat of persecution." This justification for the Asylum Bill, published on 1 November and passed by 311 to 233 votes on its second reading on 13 November, was printed in the Independent on 7 November after that paper denounced the "mean-minded little bill". Lloyd had said much the same thing on BBC Radio 4's The World Tonight on 1 November, in more pungent terms: "We can't have the whole of Asia and Africa coming to live in London."
Despite Kenneth Baker's heated denials of racist intent in Parliament, it has been clear from the outset that the Bill's design is to keep out asylum-seekers from the Third World. It does this by operating a series of procedural and substantive "presumptions against innocence". Of these, fingerprinting of all asylum-seekers is one of the most widely condemned as a basic infringement of civil rights. Its justification is the "growing problem of multiple applications for asylum and for social security benefits". But Mr Baker was only able to describe two such cases in Parliament. The accompanying rules contain a list of factors which can be held against an asylum-seeker, including destruction or damage to a passport, failure to move to a part of his/her own country which "might be safer", activities within the UK against his/her country's authorities "calculated to enhance the application", previous or concurrent asylum applications, failure to apply immediately, failure to comply with a fingerprinting order, and the actions of others without the asylum-seeker's approval. Procedure rules give an impossibly tight time scale for appealing a negative decision, and the right of appeal is not automatic but subject to the grant of leave.
Autonomous refugee and black groups, and organisations working with refugees, have been joined in their condemnation of the Bill by the churches, the Bar Council, Amnesty International and the Commission for Racial Equality, which has threatened to take the government to court under the Race Relations Act. The critics are alarmed not only by what the Bill and its rules say, which put impossible hurdles before genuine refugees and are likely to endanger many lives, but also what is not said: there are no provisions for bail in the Bill, but the Home Secretary announced the provision of 300 new places in detention centres; and legal aid is not referred to in the Bill, giving rise to fears that there will be no right to independent advice or representation for asylum-seekers.
The new Bill goes hand in hand with the increase in fines on transport operators carrying undocumented or falsely-documented passengers, from £1000 to £2000, which came into effect in August. Peter Lloyd conceded that the measures were "bound to have an effect on some genuine asylum-seekers". But a refugee denied a seat on a flight could, he said, still leave a despotic country by crossing land borders into a neighbouring state. He could not have made it clearer that in his view Third World refugees belong in their own continents.
The proposal to abolish "green form" and "pink form" legal aid for advice and assistance in asylum and immigration cases, announced in July, will be implemented, it seems clear, if the Home Office funded United Kingdom Immigrants Advisory Service (UKIAS) succumbs to the threats to its funding given in a letter from Peter Lloyd. UKIAS was told that if it did not accept the proposal to become the monopoly provider of advice, its future was uncertain, in the wake of a vote to refuse the role. There are now plans to strengthen its resistance by bringing members of other organisations such as the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) and the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture on to its management committee.