UK: Travel documents
01 November 1997
The government's announcement of a pilot project to speed up the acquisition of travel documents for rejected asylum-seekers so they can be removed faster has caused anger among refugee groups. The Home Office will no longer wait until the end of the asylum process, including appeals, before approaching the authorities of the asylum-seeker's home state to obtain travel documents to enable the asylum-seeker to be sent home, but will apply immediately they refuse the asylum claim. The pilot covers Algeria, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iran, Jamaica, Morocco and Sri Lanka. The worry is that the application for documents will let the embassy know that the person is in Britain and is on his or her way home, and most embassies will infer from the lack of documents that the person is a rejected asylum-seeker.
This is because asylum-seekers frequently destroy the passport on which they travelled. Since the combination of visa controls, carrier sanctions and the safe country rule has made refugee smuggling big business, most asylum-seekers rely on agents to get them in, and the agents usually instruct asylum-seekers to destroy the passports (with forged visas to get them on the plane) once safely on the plane.
For some states, such as Algeria or Iran, claiming asylum is held to bring the state into disrepute, and the knowledge (or strong suspicion) that one of their citizens has applied for asylum is itself likely to result in serious reprisals to them or their families at home, and possible harassment by embassy officials here. The Home Office say there is no evidence returned asylum-seekers suffer reprisals, but they have carried out no systematic monitoring of rejected asylum-seekers. It is particularly worrying since the Home Office is becoming increasingly hardline on Iranian asylum-seekers, and retains its hardline stance on Algerians who claim to fear persecution from the state, and so it is necessary for more and more asylum-seekers from those countries to go through the appellate procedure to have their claims recognised (and sometimes, not even then). Meanwhile, in September the UN High Commissioner for Refugees warned that members of Islamic groups, as well as journalists, artists, intellectuals, judges and security forces and westernised women, were at serious risk if returned to Algeria.