UK: Asylum Bill - gone but not forgotten
01 March 1992
The Asylum Bill was quietly abandoned in mid-February in the face of strong cross-party opposition to most of its provisions, which would have prevented its speedy disposal in time for the general election.
On 10 February, Home Secretary Kenneth Baker conceded defeat on his plans to end "green form" legal aid for advice and assistance on immigration and asylum matters, after a campaign had exposed the injustices of the scheme. Baker had intended to turn the Home Office-funded United Kingdom Immigrants Advisory Service (UKIAS) into the sole provider of legal advice in the field. But UKIAS itself voted against the proposal, and attempts by the Home Office to force its hand by threats to its funding had resulted in deep splits in the organisation. This, together with findings of racial discrimination in the selection of staff, made its choice a political impossibility, and there was no other organisation which could carry out the monopoly provision of immigration advice.
Just three days later came the news that the Asylum Bill was not to proceed any further after its second reading in the Lords.
Opposition to the Bill centred on its provisions for finger-printing of asylum-seekers, deportation of visitors and students whose asylum claims were rejected, dilution of local authorities' duties to house homeless asylum-seekers, and a right of appeal hedged about with strict procedural and substantive restrictions.
The Bill is, however, likely to return after the General Election. Although Roy Hattersley, Shadow Home Secretary has called the Bill "despicable" in parliament, Labour's Home Affairs spokesman, Alastair Darling, was quoted at the beginning of March as saying that if the Home Office "meet the outstanding objections made by us and the refugee groups, I do not see any problem in getting the Bill on to the statute book".
The European dimension
At its December 1991 meeting in Maastricht the Ad Hoc Group of Ministers responsible for immigration agreed on further measures to harmonise the immigration and asylum laws and practices of the EC member states. The Ad Hoc group, as its name suggests, is not within EC competence, but works on an intergovernmental level within the twelve. It has produced the Dublin Convention, signed in 1990, which restricts asylum-seekers to one application in Europe and denies them the right to choose the country they apply to by making the first EC country they arrive in responsible for determining their claim.
Under the Convention, the RIO ("refugees in orbit") phenomenon has grown, as refugees are shunted between one European air or sea-port and another, and countries squabble over their responsibility to take them. The Group has also produced a draft Convention on the crossing of external borders, which defines common visa policies and criteria, and proposes a common list of "undesirables" who are to be refused entry to all EC states.
The Ad Hoc Group's point of departure on refugees is that many, if not most, are "bogus" - disguised economic refugees. It recommends fingerprinting as an acceptable way of identifying asylum-seekers. It also wants to see a "fast-track" procedure to deal with "manifestly ill-founded" applications, and has set up working groups to work out how to identify such claims. To the Group, harmonisation of refugee laws and reception procedures is vital to ensure that all EC countries are equally unattractive to would-be asylum-seekers.
The "harmonisation" of a common policy is likely to lead to the lowest common denominator approach to refugees throughout Europe. If Germany has "collection camps" where refugees are detained, so should the rest of Europe. If Germany fingerprints refugees (it has done since 1990), so should the rest of Europe. If Denmark and Italy and Germany and Britain fine airlines who carry refugees without documents, so should the rest of Europe.