Asylum & Immigration Bill - the opposition grows
The Kosovo refugee crisis has brought home the reality of the experience of flight from persecution. The crisis has also raised grave questions about the treatment of refugees in the UK, which is to be reformed in the Immigration & Asylum Bill, currently before Parliament.

Amnesty International has engaged positively in a long consultation process with the Government about the reforms of refugee policy. However, the Bill is very far from meeting Amnesty’s concerns. The Bill extends the 1996 Asylum and Immigration Act, which tried to prevent refugees from coming to the UK and deny them benefits. In opposition, Jack Straw said of that Act that it ‘hits genuine asylum seekers as hard as fraudulent applicants’. The Home Office admits that the new Bill does the same.

The Government justifies the measures as being necessary to deter false claims, but they have a disproportionate impact on people who are fleeing persecution genuinely. The Bill provides for:

• Poverty and discrimination against refugees. The support arrangements discriminate against refugees, thus violating a fundamental principle of international law. These arrangements will also deliberately place refugees below the poverty line. Refugee children will be denied the protection they need by an amendment to the Children Act 1989.
  
• Barriers to protection. Pre-entry controls try to prevent refugees from coming to the UK. They violate international law. They force airline staff and others to be immigration officers by penalising them for bringing in refugees without proper documents. But refugees, by definition, may not have proper documents. Kosovo refugees, for example, have been stripped of their identity documents at border crossings precisely to make it more difficult for them to return. No law can stop desperate people from fleeing persecution: all pre-entry controls do is criminalise them.
  
• Detention without judicial control. The Bill provides for automatic bail hearings. Unlike people facing criminal charges, being granted bail is made more difficult as there is no presumption in favour of liberty, no guaranteed access to representation and refugees may not even be brought before a judge in person. Refugees from Kosovo have been detained in the UK simply for having claimed asylum.
  
• No access to legal advice. Refugees will be dispersed to all areas of the UK but no provisions have been worked out for increased levels of legal advice in the dispersal areas. As refugees will be given only £1 (50p for children) per day, it will be impossible to telephone lawyers, travel to see them or travel to important interviews or appeal hearings.

The Home Secretary has declared that the Bill is compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Amnesty International disagrees strongly. In our view, the Bill violates international law, including the Refugee Convention, the Child Rights Convention and the ECHR.

Amnesty International has repeatedly urged the UK Government to re-think the Bill as a matter of the utmost urgency and not to ignore the human rights of refugees. The Government has not yet responded to our pleas. Amnesty International is, therefore, calling upon MPs to oppose this Bill in its current form and to stop its progress through Parliament.

Simon Russell
Poverty 103 Summer 1999