Examination of Witnesses (Questions 264
- 279)
TUESDAY 20 MAY 2003
MS JAN
SHAW, MR
MICHAEL KINGSLEY-NYINAH,
MR TOM
BENTLEY AND
MR THEO
KEENCAMP
Q264 Chairman: Can I just ask each
of you to say who you are and what you do for the record.
Ms Shaw: I am Jan Shaw. I am the
Programme Director for Refugee Affairs at Amnesty International
UK.
Q265 Chairman: Thank you. Mr Bentley?
Mr Bentley: I am Tom Bentley.
I am the Director of Demos, which is an independent policy think-tank
based in London that produces ideas on many topics including asylum
and migration.
Q266 Chairman: Mr Keencamp, good
morning, welcome.
Mr Keencamp: Thank you. I am Theo
Keencamp, the Head of Strategy in the Netherlands Ministry of
Justice, but I am here today in my capacity as an associate of
Demos.
Q267 Chairman: Can you just tell
us how you became interested in the refugee issue?
Mr Keencamp: Before I was Head
of Strategy I was Director General of the Netherlands Agency for
the reception of asylum seekers and in that capacity I became
acutely confronted with the limitations and possibilities of anything
to do with migration.
Q268 Chairman: How long were you
in that post?
Mr Keencamp: From 1993 to 1998.
Q269 Chairman: So you have a lot
of hands-on experience.
Mr Keencamp: Right. When people
were asking me what I did I said I was the manager of the fastest
growing and most controversial hotel chain in the Netherlands!
Q270 Chairman: We will come back
to that in a minute. Mr Kingsley-Nyinah, welcome.
Mr Kingsley-Nyinah: Thank you
very much. My name is Michael Kingsley-Nyinah. I am the Deputy
Representative at the London office of the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees.
Chairman: Thank you. Can I just say to
our witnesses, some of the questions you will be asked are ones
that all of you may have an opinion about, but some will be specific
to specific witnesses and we do want to avoid four answers to
every question otherwise we will not get very far. I leave it
to you to judge when you have something that needs to be said.
Mrs Dean is going to start the ball rolling.
Q271 Mrs Dean: This is a question
for all of you. How far is the rise in asylum applications over
the last ten years due to factors specific to the UK?
Ms Shaw: I think when you look
at the countries that asylum applicants are coming from you will
see a direct correlation between the human rights violations in
those countries and the number of applicants that leave those
countries and come to the UK and other Western industrialised
countries. If you look at the last year, 2002, the largest number
of applicants came from Iraq, Zimbabwe, Somalia and Afghanistan.
I think everybody knows about the widespread violations of human
rights that are happening in those countries. You also have to
remember that when conditions improve, as in Sri Lanka, applications
from those countries do go down. If you look at the figures for
Sri Lanka for the last year, the number of applicants has gone
down by 42%. I think we also have to bear in mind that most refugees
do just cross an international border and although we have seen
the number of applications go up in this country, the majority
of people still stay in their own region of the world. Recent
research commissioned by the Home Office last year showed that
when people set out and they are fleeing from persecution or discrimination
their main objective is to reach a place of safety, other factors
come in after that time. I believe that there is a direct correlation
between the human rights abuses and where people are coming from
to this country.
Q272 Mrs Dean: Mr Bentley?
Mr Bentley: Briefly, I think the
general answer to your question is not very far in that the factors
encouraging what increases there are—and there is quite
a lot of flux even in the short-term in the number of asylum seekers—have
to do with conditions and forces that act on and apply to the
whole of the European region, so all the western European countries.
That said, there may well be specific reasons why refugees and
asylum seekers from specific countries end up with the UK as their
destination and many of those are to do with our historic relations
with different parts of the world.
Mr Kingsley-Nyinah: I would only
add that refugee issues are inherently international in their
scope and in their nature and for this reason it is important
for you to see the experience in the UK within the proper regional
and international context, and it is in that regard that I would
emphasise what the delegate from Amnesty International has said,
that there are objective reasons that propel people to come to
the UK, but if one looks at international perspectives one sees
that the trends in asylum applications in the UK can be logically
explained and they can be systematically addressed. The reasons
lie in human rights abuses in the countries of origin from where
these people come, but in addition to that one must also have
regard to the conditions under which people have protection in
the regions of origin. There are huge difficulties in terms of
the standards of protection that are available in some of the
regions that host the largest numbers of refugees and that also
serves as a secondary reason that propels flight towards the west.
Q273 Mrs Dean: Could you estimate
what proportion of those claiming asylum are actually fleeing
persecution as opposed to seeking economic opportunities?
Mr Kingsley-Nyinah: It would be
difficult for me to speculate on that. One pointer would be the
number of people who have their claims for asylum recognised in
the UK and in Europe. Those statistics are available, I do not
have them to hand, but I would like to believe that it is a respectable
majority that justifies maintaining the current system albeit
with certain changes that would make it more efficient.
Ms Shaw: If you look at the figures
for last year on the number of people who were given leave to
remain after their cases had been looked at on their individual
merits, fully considered, you will see that more than 40% of people
were allowed to stay and a further 22% actually won their appeals.
Q274 Mrs Dean: Some of our previous
witnesses claim that the UK domestic courts are more inclined
to be generous to asylum seekers when interpreting international
conventions than their continental counterparts. Do you think
that is the case and, if so, why?
Ms Shaw: I do not know if that
is the case. I know that we do interpret the Refugee Convention
in a generous way in some respects but then so do a lot of other
European countries. Others do not allow the persecution by non-state
agents which we do.
Mr Bentley: I share the view that
UK courts tend towards generosity in the way that they seek to
interpret. I do not know the way in which you could make a systematic
comparison with the qualities or the interpretations of other
countries.
Q275 Mrs Dean: Mr Keencamp?
Mr Keencamp: In the Netherlands
there has been a period of rather important change of the whole
system, simplifying the procedure, reducing the number of appeal
possibilities, investing much more in a quick assessment, a sort
of "weeding out" of the ethnic families, and parallel
to these exchanges has been a substantial reduction in the influx
of asylum seekers and also a number of major conflicts have been
evident. It is still very difficult to attribute effect and cause
with each other because is it the consequence of less conflict
in the world during that period or of the changes in the system.
It is a very difficult question to analyse.
Mr Kingsley-Nyinah: You asked
a question about the comparison between the UK's approach to refugee
criteria and the European approach. It is extremely difficult
to offer a direct comparison between these two. I think the best
answer I can give is that the experience is extremely mixed. There
are certain respects in which the UK's interpretation of criteria
does tend to be more liberal than the interpretation in other
parts of the world, but the converse is also true. From UNHCR's
point of view the important issue is to support the process of
harmonisation which is going on in the European Union to ensure
that the disparities in the approaches to the refugee criteria
are evened out with time, and to use that process of harmonisation
to support asylum systems nationally. I think that is what one
should look towards rather than indulge in a comparison of the
different systems.
Q276 Mrs Dean: Thank you for that.
Can I turn to the backlog. Obviously we know that a tremendous
backlog built up. Could you suggest why that happened, how effective
the Government has been in tackling it, and what further steps
you think we could take?
Mr Bentley: The processing of
hundreds of thousands of cases particularly in situations of backlog
is actually a familiar bureaucratic problem rather than one that
is unique to this situation. There are various factors that make
this situation unique and one of them is the lack of incentive
for people being processed to participate fully or co-operate
with the attempt to get their cases processed and finished. So
without claiming a huge amount of special knowledge of the inside
details of the difficulties of processing in the UK context in
this area, I think it is quite clear that, first of all, the complexity
of the process itself—and simplification is an issue in
many different national systems—has been a major contributor
to the difficulty of maintaining the rate of flow through. Secondly,
it may well be the case, and this is touched on in our examination
of possible future options which we may come on to, that it is
not possible to process these things more swiftly, more transparently
or more effectively and fairly unless the balance of incentives
for the individual participant in the process changes so that
there are some better reasons to co-operate fully with the bureaucratic
process as it continues. Thirdly, and perhaps the most fundamental
issue, it is actually very difficult particularly as time goes
on to differentiate in bureaucratic category and institutional
processing between the various reasons that might constitute a
motivation for having arrived in this country and sought asylum.
Actually, when you look at the social reality, and various commentators
and studies of the situation have said this, it can be impossible
to differentiate between the negative push factors of persecution
and the positive factors of family reunification or economic opportunity.
That can only make the backlog harder to clear.
Mr Keencamp: We have also had
an enormous backlog of applications in the Netherlands and despite
what I have just said about improvement and simplification of
the procedures, in the new Cabinet, which starts at the end of
next week and against the political will of all parties concerned,
they have agreed upon a legalisation procedure for quite a number
of asylum seekers who have been waiting too long. This is also
one of the major reasons why the new Cabinet has also decided,
despite the fact that the new law has only been there for a number
of years, to overrule fundamentally the system of asylum.
Q277 Chairman: It has been put to
us that one of the reasons why very large numbers of asylum seekers
come here is because the chances of being removed if your claim
fails are not very high. How high is it in the Netherlands?
Mr Keencamp: It is difficult to
prove this, but reality shows that the longer you are following
the procedure the lower the chances are that even in the end,
if you are rejected, you will be able, on the basis of the rule
of law and legal regulations, to be sent back to your country
and that is simply because we are all very decent countries under
the rule of law. More and more popular uprising and discontent
is happening when people who have been following the procedure
for so long nevertheless are sent back. So there is indeed a correlation
between the length of procedure and implementability of the regulations
in the end, yes, I think so.
Q278 Chairman: What percentage of
failed asylum seekers in Holland are returned to their country
of origin?
Mr Keencamp: I do not know the
exact number, but in the last few years there has been a stepping
up of the rate of people being sent back, it differs very much
from country to country and of course a lot of energy is put in
to negotiating better return agreements with individual governments
preferably in the context of the European Union. I fully support
what has been said here, this can only be solved in a co-ordinated
fashion within a European Union framework, but all of these things
have made people in the Netherlands think twice about whether
we should continue this way or not and that is basically why I
am here, to tell you more about an alternative approach.
Q279 Chairman: We will come on to
that. Mr Kingsley-Nyinah, you said that in certain respects the
UK system was more generous than other ones in Europe. In which
respects?
Mr Kingsley-Nyinah: I was responding
to a specific question about how the courts interpret the criteria
for refugee status that are in the Articles of the 1951 Convention
and I was trying to suggest that the experience is very mixed.
The example was given of how one approaches persecution by agents
that are not within the states structure and in that regard the
general opinion is that the courts in Germany and France tend
to be much more restrictive in their approach than the courts
of the UK. On the other hand, the UK has developed a doctrine
of effective protection which, when you come to think of it, actually
has the same outcome of making it very difficult for persons who
flee persecution from individuals and groups to have their claims
recognised.
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