Examination of Witnesses (Questions 340
- 359)
TUESDAY 20 MAY 2003
MS JAN
SHAW, MR
MICHAEL KINGSLEY-NYINAH,
MR TOM
BENTLEY AND
MR THEO
KEENCAMP
Q340 Mr Cameron: You would not prevent
someone from coming to the UK but if they got to the UK and said,
"I claim asylum", they would be returned to the transit
centre.
Mr Kingsley-Nyinah: In our scheme,
those who would be redirected to processing centres within Europe
would be those whose claims could be said to be manifestly unfounded
according to a commonly agreed set of criteria. All others would
have the right to have their claim determined on UK soil. For
those who are redirected to centres within Europe for the determination
of their manifestly unfounded claims, there would be expedited
procedures with the necessary safeguards but most crucially there
would be in place, in advance of the system operating, the readmission
agreements and readmission arrangements that would ensure their
rapid removal to their countries of origin after they have been
found not to be in need of international protection. We are quite
confident that with time the message would go around that if your
claim is not a solid one that meets the criteria it would not
be in your interest to pack bag and baggage and just head for
the European Union or for the UK in the hope that you would be
accepted. There are three critical aspects to this. One is to
redirect those whose claims can be said to be manifestly unfounded
because, in our view, it is those claims that have brought the
asylum system into some disrepute. It is those who do not have
a prayer in terms of the asylum criteria who overburden the system
who we could within the framework of protection principles redirect
and process elsewhere within the EU. You notice that I emphasise
"within the EU" because in the UNHCR scheme those processing
centres should be located within Europe. We think it is important
for the system to benefit from the infrastructure, from the benefits
in terms of location within the EU continent. It would be much
easier for high standards to be ensured and so on. We are offering
a comprehensive system which will work organically. Each element
is linked to the other and it is important not to look at any
one element in isolation.
Q341 Mr Cameron: Is not the problem
that, under your argument, you are still maintaining a national
system where people can come and apply in the UK? You are saying
if your claim is manifestly unfounded, you will be sent straight
to the processing centre. If it is not, it will be processed and
you are still going to have that vast legal treadmill we have
in this country of appeals, new appeals and judicial reviews.
You asked earlier, if a country got rid of its own asylum system,
how would it persuade Pakistan to maintain its system. Is not
part of this possibly that if you got rid of the UK system that
costs £2 billion, you could fund processing centres in Pakistan,
in Europe and elsewhere? Is not your solution too organic? It
is too small a change to solve the bigger problem.
Mr Kingsley-Nyinah: Not at all.
Part of our scheme is radical reform of national asylum systems
so that they become more efficient. This is crucial because in
addition to dealing with fewer claims, if national asylum systems
are reformed to make them efficient—and we have made some
suggestions about how that can be done; it will require very radical
changes—if you have a combination of the reform system with
fewer claims to deal with, claims which one can even assume are
likely to be accepted, then you have a formula for a rapidly improved
asylum system which will allow the UK to retain its system. One
cannot over-emphasise the need for reform in the UK system. It
is a very entrenched system. It works well in many ways but there
are very many areas where a lot of things could be changed.
Q342 Mr Cameron: It has been suggested
from people who came to speak last week that one solution could
be a quota system effectively going further than Mr Kingsley-Nyinah
is suggesting. Effectively, the right to claim asylum in a country
would be removed. Everyone would have to be transferred to transit
centre. As a result, with the money that would be saved, we can
have a far more generous number of asylum seekers that would be
taken in this country. You could effectively double or treble
them because we are a generous, tolerant, democratic country.
If the point of an asylum system is to give asylum to people fleeing
torture, what is wrong with that?
Ms Shaw: I think that resettlement
programmes should complement procedures to decide on individual
asylum applications, not replace them. I do not think you can
cut out a spontaneous asylum system and I do not see why you would
want to.
Q343 Mr Cameron: What is spontaneous
about our system?
Ms Shaw: People being able to
come here of their own volition and apply for asylum within the
UK. The way you paint it sounds very ideal but would it be like
that? There are already lots of camps around the world which host
enormous numbers of refugees and asylum seekers who are just forgotten
about.
Q344 Mr Cameron: They certainly do
not make it to the UK. The ones who come to the UK are young men.
That is what we are told. The women and the elderly all may be
fleeing persecution. What chance have they of crossing continents,
paying criminal gangs, breaking the law? We fund £2 million
to the refugee camps and £2 billion we spend on our asylum
system. Should not Amnesty be radical? You almost sound like the
conservatives in all this: we must keep everything as it is. Should
you not say, "Scratch this. Let us have a quota and increase
the number of people we give asylum to"?
Ms Shaw: We could be radical but
we also want to be fair and keep all the legal safeguards that
people who are vulnerable need. The other way of addressing this
is something that Amnesty is known for, which is looking at the
violations of human rights in the countries of origin and addressing
the root causes. I think governments could be a bit more aggressive
about doing that.
Q345 Chairman: Mr Kingsley-Nyinah,
your transit centres would be very large, would they not?
Mr Kingsley-Nyinah: No, they would
not. If you will forgive me, we do not use the term "transit
centres."
Q346 Chairman: What do you call them?
Mr Kingsley-Nyinah: We call them
processing centres.
Q347 Chairman: How many people do
you think there would be in one of these processing centres?
Mr Kingsley-Nyinah: We are suggesting
that it is sensible to begin on a small scale, on a pilot basis,
so that everybody can see what works well and so that we can work
on a consensus for how the system can be expanded. It is likely
that—although I am speculating here—in the initial
stages of its operation there may well be large numbers of persons
who are on the list of countries that are deemed not normally
to produce refugees, but we believe that as the system progresses
and as results are showing that those who are found not to be
in need of international protection are rapidly returned perhaps
there will be certain reductions in the numbers ultimately. We
are not conceiving of massive centres. We think there are too
many difficulties in terms of management and ensuring proper standards
in these centres. We would prefer smaller, well managed, tightly
managed, closed centres in certain parts of Europe.
Q348 Chairman: Did you say "closed"?
Mr Kingsley-Nyinah: Yes.
Q349 Chairman: And secured, presumably?
Mr Kingsley-Nyinah: Yes.
Q350 Chairman: People could not get
out and melt away into the general population?
Mr Kingsley-Nyinah: That is the
understanding. We are very firm on the view that this would not
be in prison-like conditions. We would push for the highest possible
standards but we are pragmatic enough to understand that an entirely
open centre would not work at all. We are also insisting that
the manifestly unfounded proceedings should be subject to very
strict time limits. In the event that those time limits are breached,
it would be important for another humane solution to be found.
Q351 Chairman: What do you think
of that, Mr Keenkamp?
Mr Keencamp: It all depends. I
listen to our colleagues and the difference between our thought
exercise and what I have heard is that we try to find an acceptable,
workable solution for that very large part in the asylum influx
which does not primarily look for protection in the Geneva sense,
but nevertheless does have reasons to move. I call them the survival
migrants. That is where we begin. Ambitious and speculative as
it may be, let us just try to find a way in the end which will
be workable. After that, you get a totally different discussion
about what remains in classical terms as the asylum procedure.
That is why it is difficult to exchange arguments with my colleagues
because I start from a different point.
Q352 Chairman: You are not talking
about large concentrations of people, are you?
Mr Keencamp: No.
Q353 Chairman: You are just talking
about entry into processing facilities around the world, presumably,
in the areas where the problems are?
Mr Keencamp: That is right, yes.
Q354 Chairman: In your pamphlet there
is a chapter repositioning European economic and welfare systems.
What is all that about?
Mr Keencamp: It is basically based
on two observations. That a sizeable part of the migrants start
working in—what you call the black economy, which in the
Netherlands we call the grey economy—the informal sector.
So you could look at this as a bad thing. You could also say:
"This actually is a very necessary bridge between two types
of economies, so let us find ways to give them a proper place
in our economic system," and then we have some ideas about
this. The other reason is one of, let us say, the emotions around
asylum: are they just as much entitled as we are to all those
entitlements or not. This is one of the sensitive aspects of the
discussion. What we say is maybe if we look ahead to the next
50 years in Europe, we are in need of an overhaul of our security
system anyway.
Q355 Chairman: Our social security
system?
Mr Keencamp: Yes. Because it is
not affordable any more, then let us do it in a way which can
also be instrumental to a more balanced way of dealing both with,
if I may say so, the natives and the newcomers. I am not going
into the details, but they were connected in these two ways with
our thorough analysis of the immigration process. That is why
we started to talk.
Q356 Chairman: You are talking about
it being done in the context of a harmonisation?
Mr Keencamp: Not only a harmonisation,
but I think that Mr Bentley could elaborate on that.
Q357 Chairman: Okay.
Mr Bentley: If I can try and clarify
it for you. One of the difficulties with the asylum and the immigration
debate is that it very often has to take place as if European
politics and various European national systems are trying to maintain
this level of security and the quality of life that they offer
to their citizens in essentially a static form. The reality, of
course, is that every European national society is beginning to
confront questions about the fairly radical restructuring of their
welfare systems, their handling of demographic issues, the underlying
basis of their wealth and prosperity and the way that their economies
work. What we are proposing—and we should be clear that
the later chapters of this pamphlet are even more speculative
than the first chapters, which set out the details of the system—is
that the renegotiation of systems for managing the flow of people
in a voluntary sense, and in the sense of displacement and refugees
seeking protection, needs to be conducted in parallel with the
progressive restructuring and, to some extent, reinvention of
our basic welfare and economic institutions. Now, in some cases
that might well involve harmonisation, but it does not involve
harmonisation in the sense of negotiating a common set of rules
and then imposing them from some pan-European perspective on every
national society. What we are searching for and what we are trying
to push towards is the idea that you can negotiate the institutional
arrangements for Europe, European governance and societal arrangements
which can manage, in practice, to be simultaneously more open
and have more conditions attached to their membership or participation.
Now, that may sound paradoxical, and the reason it sounds paradoxical
is partly because our welfare systems are based on the idea that
once you are in, you are entitled. To a large extent they are
based on trying to offer fairness, social equity and basic improvements
in material living standards for the vast majority of domestic
populations. What we are saying is we are going to have to very
carefully renegotiate these questions, not automatically to exclude
chunks of the domestic population, but to find new combinations
of social and fiscal investment in life chances, in opportunities,
in social security with new forms of conditionality which make
the fiscal arrangements sustainable in the long term.
Q358 Chairman: Can you just translate
that for me? It sounded a bit Dutch to me.
Mr Bentley: What I mean is, over
the life course stronger forms of conditionality.
Q359 Chairman: No, can you try and
explain that as I cannot understand the comment?
Mr Bentley: Okay.
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