UK: Safe country list
01 May 1995
In April 1995, the Home Office Asylum and Special Cases Division announced a pilot scheme for a shortened asylum determination procedure, to start on 15 May. Some asylum-seekers from Ghana, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Romania and Poland were to be interviewed immediately on making their asylum claim, and were to be given five working days after the interview to submit documentary evidence in support of their claim. A decision on their claim would then be made, and no further evidence arriving after that date would be considered.
The idea behind the scheme is to weed out obviously unfounded claims for asylum by speedy processing of claims from countries which, in the view of the Home Office, produce few refugees. The pilot follows an earlier experiment in which asylum-seekers from Ghana, Romania and India were interviewed instead of being given self-completion asylum questionnaires. But refugee and human rights organisations are very concerned that once again, asylum rights are being cut in the drive to save money. They point to the fact that, of the countries selected for the pilot by the Home Office, Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have all been the subject of recent condemnation by Amnesty International and others for their human rights abuses, and there is evidence of persecution of minorities such as Gypsies in Romania and Poland. Northern Sri Lanka, Punjab, Kashmir and the oilfield regions of Nigeria are all experiencing civil war and/or severe repression.
They also complain that the Home Office is not playing fair. The Refugee Council has lodged a complaint that the Home Office has broken an undertaking that it would discuss the findings of the earlier, more limited scheme before embarking on further pilots. Instead, the Council says, the Home Office has justified the new scheme by claiming that the earlier one "was successful in speeding up the procedure without reducing the quality of the decisions" - without saying by whom and how it was monitored.
If decisions were generally of reasonable quality, there would be less cause for concern. But, as a recent report from Asylum Aid, "No reason at all", reveals, the reasoning deployed in refusing asylum claims ranges from the dishonest to the bizarre. A Zairean who claimed to have escaped to Congo by canoe across the river Zaire was told that he could not have done so because of the "size, strength and considerable dangers posed by the river such as shifting sandbanks and crocodiles". Asked to produce evidence for this assertion, the Home Office withdrew the line of reasoning. Another Zairean told the Home Office that soldiers raided his house, arrested his father and shot his brother. The Home Office "noted your claim that the soldiers were firing wildly within the house, and considered that the shooting of your brother was not necessarily a deliberate act. He further noted that they did not shoot your father, who was the most politically active member of your family." Another example of perfect logic, encountered by a Colombian asylum-seeker in May, was: "Your enemies have had ample opportunity to kill you, but they have not done so."
These examples disclose the reasoning of the Asylum Unit when it is not under pressure of time. As UNHCR warns, "The more accelerated the procedure, the higher the risk of mistake." A week is simply not long enough to allow an asylum-seeker to gather evidence. An appointment with the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, important for an asylum-seeker who claims to have been tortured, takes a month to six weeks to set up.
In all but name the Home Office has produced a safe country list, such as Germany operates. Nationals from these countries are assumed not to be persecuted in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary. All the more reason why they should have a proper opportunity to produce such evidence.
Appeals squeezed
To criticisms such as these the Home office count