PIERRE IS AN INTENSE man of 32 years whose story is cinematic in scope. It begins in Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo, in June 1997, when his father was assassinated on the veranda of their villa. Pierre and his family were later found by the militia. For two days he was beaten and tortured with electric shocks. His sisters were raped repeatedly. His brother was killed. The militia left and the family decided to walk to their home village. On the way, Pierre’s mother died.
The family lived in a refugee camp in Gabon until August 2000, when Pierre decided to seek asylum. He chose England because “it is a country of human rights”. He arrived in Dover on August 30, 2000, and spent the next five months in detention in Lindholm prison. He does not know why. Eventually he was given bail and was assessed by the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. His initial claim was rejected and he lost two subsequent appeals. He was told that he was to be deported in December 2001. His MP then appealed directly to the Home Office. In February, the Home Office overturned all previous decisions, giving him exceptional leave to enter the UK until 2007.
He relays his story in ponderous French. Pierre is bitter about his treatment, and eloquent with it, but the reason I am telling his story is that it frames so well what observers see as the key problem within the UK asylum system, which is the uneven quality of decision- making. This can be seen both in rulings on asylum cases and for detention. “You must understand that this is a question of lottery really,” he says. “It depends on the judge.”
The uneven nature of decisions — by immigration officers, adjudicators, and the Home Office — feeds and creates the chaos and lack of trust that bedevil the system. Delays are also endemic: it is common at appeals hearings for the Home Office representative simply not to show up, and everything will be rescheduled for several months’ time. Yet the latest asylum Bill, which is the fourth piece of legislation in 10 years and was still being battled over yesterday, does not address this problem. Instead, it concentrates on citizenship, security, economic migration and accommodation centres.
With asylum the Government tends to talk about policy, not individual human beings. Perhaps it is instructive then that when the Immigration Minister, Beverley Hughes, does give me a case study, it is of a bogus asylum-seeker. “When I was in Dover I stood by an immigration officer for some time and a coach with a number of Czech Roma people came in. I heard this man come to the desk and claim asylum. This was the third time that man had claimed asylum in three years. The first time he went home of his own accord; the second he’d been returned, and here he was again. Now that is a clearly unfounded claim and we need more facilities like those to fast-track them.”
The impression given is that security and deterrence can solve the asylum crisis. Certainly this was a major focus of the leaked memo on the subject to No 10 last May. But even Beverley Hughes says that asylum- seekers do not come to Britain because we are seen as a soft touch. “I don’t think it is so much the soft touch, myself. Actually, compared with some of the countries, we are about middling in the way we actually treat asylum-seekers, though we are toughening that up.”
She returns to the subject of detention and removals and the need for accommodation centres. These centres, which are to be as self-contained as spaceships, will house 750 people each and are to be located in rural England. The idea has enraged locals, campaigners, some MPs and Lords. This week, amid acrimonious debate in Parliament, the Government abandoned plans for one centre, and yesterday was set to make more concessions.
A huge amount of time and effort has gone into the idea and debate over accommodation centres and yet, when seen in context, you have to wonder why. “They will enable us to keep contact with people while their claims are being processed,” says Hughes. Yet even if all four centres were built, at a cost that can only be imagined as no estimates are available, they would house a total of fewer than 4,000 people at any one time. Most asylum cases, if they go to appeal, take many months. (The figure at the moment is more than 13 months.) Then consider the fact that 71,700 people sought asylum in the UK last year. Accommodation centres, even if they are ever built, would house less than 10 per cent of applicants.
Many observers think the Government puts forward initiatives like this because it has given up on the system. David Rhys Jones, the founder of a new group called Detention Watch UK, says the asylum system needs to be robust, transparent and fair. But he and others believe the “hawks” at the Home Office think the current system is simply not fixable. “I do think they’ve almost given up on getting it right.”
Nor, in human terms, does it make sense to be tough for the sake of it. Tim Baster, coordinator of the group Bail for Immigration Detainees, says: “To detain a family when there is no indication that a family is going to run away is absurd. It’s a waste of public money, apart from anything else.”
Nick Hardwick, of the Refugee Council, thinks the Government has become sidetracked as it seeks to placate critics and see off the Far Right. “What you have seen in the past months is the idea that we are really going to get tough. But if you talk tough, rather than act smart, you have conceded the ground to the Far Right, but you’ve also demonstrated that democratic politicians cannot solve this problem, because the problem isn’t as you’ve described. Therefore, you create the grounds for doubt.” He says talking tough emboldens the very critics it was meant to placate. “You do not throw meat to the sharks in the hope that the sharks will go away. It just makes a lot more sharks come.”
