CONCLUSION
154. The United Kingdom should continue its
long and honourable tradition of giving asylum to those genuinely
escaping persecution. This responsibility should be shared, as
now, with other democracies. We accept that a large proportion
of those seeking asylum-world wide do not fully satisfy the criteria
for asylum. If the UK is to carry out its obligations to genuine
asylum-seekers, it needs to make a clearer distinction between
them and other people arriving in the UK for settlement. The 1951
Convention did not envisage refugees being able to travel not
just to neighbouring countries but to far distant ones. The number
of refugees from all over the world who would be eligible for
asylum in the UK is unlikely to diminish in the foreseeable future.
The needs of people fleeing persecution in their own countries
should be met as far as possible in the nearest safe country to
the one from which they are fleeing.
155. Few if any countries are organised to provide
housing, education, health and other public services for large
movements of genuine refugees and economic migrants. There needs
to be a national debate about the implications of greater movement
of people around the world and this should take place in a wider
context than just the issues of asylum-seeking and illegal immigration.
Most important of all, there should be international action led
by EU countries to support countries near areas of conflict in
accommodating refugees.
156. Improving the speed and quality of the
asylum decision-making process should ease some of the problems
associated with the operation of the 1951 Convention. Rather than
changing the 1951 Convention, action within the European Union
presents the most immediate international prospect of the UK meeting
its obligations to those seeking asylum in a more efficient way.
The Dublin Convention should be revised as soon as possible. The
basic principle should be that asylum applications should be made
in the first EU country reached. Any subsequent EU country to
which the applicant travels should have the right to insist that
the application for asylum be made in the previous country, except
in those cases where the applicant has valid grounds, such as
a visa or immediate family already settled, for making the application
in the subsequent country. There should be no need for the Red
Cross centre at Sangatte to house hundreds of people near Calais
as a base for making repeated attempts to enter the UK.
157. The 1951 UN Convention on the Status
of Refugees should be updated to reflect changes over the past
fifty years. We recognise that this cannot be done in the short-term
but, given the unrelenting pressure, we do think that the way
the 1951 Convention is interpreted in modern circumstances needs
to be clarified urgently. In particular we ask whether people
fleeing persecution in their own country should be found refuge
in nearby safe countries rather than in countries far away. The
most immediate task is to improve the procedures for handling
refugees, in line with the Home Secretary's Lisbon proposals,
in terms of swift identification of genuine refugees, treatment
of refugee and asylum issues in the regions where they occur,
examining the factors which cause migration and the EU categorising
other countries according to the level of persecution or safety.
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