The protests at Mosney this week have highlighted the delays that follow any request for asylum in the Republic. The Government says it is being fair. Critics say the system is denying people their human rights
AHMED COUNTS himself lucky to have escaped his home in Baghdad in 2006. His father, a member of the Baath party in Iraq, was targeted by militias after the US-led invasion of his country. “My uncle was murdered because he looked like my father, and my brothers were kidnapped, held hostage and tortured. I remember when we fled Iraq there were bombs every day, and killings,” he says. “It was terrible.”
Ahmed escaped to Syria with his father and mother and managed to get to Ireland in 2007, when they all applied for asylum in the hope of finding a haven from political persecution. “I was 17 years old when I arrived in Ireland. When I filed my application for asylum I was just told to fill in the form myself, and I didn’t join my father’s application for asylum,” he says.
That proved to be a costly mistake for Ahmed, who was refused refugee status on the ground that Baathists’ families are not considered at risk of persecution. His father and mother, on the other hand, were both granted refugee status in 2008 and now live in a quiet suburban home in Dublin.
Ahmed is one of the 111 asylum seekers living at the accommodation centre in Mosney, Co Meath, who have been told they have to move to new hostels at short notice by the Reception and Integration Agency, a unit of the Department of Justice that accommodates and feeds asylum seekers.
The lack of consultation has provoked a week of protests at the former Butlins holiday camp, which is the biggest asylum centre in the State, housing 800 people.
“I’ve been here four years now, and I’m beginning to lose hope. I have now applied for subsidiary protection from the State, but I’ve had no word for two years on what is going to happen to me,” says Ahmed, whose parents have poor English and suffer from ill health.
Sitting in his parents’ front room, surrounded by scores of letters from Department of Justice agencies that deal with asylum seekers, Ahmed points to the decision of the Refugee Appeals Tribunal on his case. The letter concludes that not including Ahmed on his father’s asylum application as a minor was a “strange one”.
This has led Ahmed to believe he would have been given refugee status if he had received good legal advice when he arrived and joined his father’s asylum application rather than making his own. He faces a long and stressful wait to find out if he will be allowed to stay with his parents in Ireland.
He is not alone.
New figures show that a backlog of 11,700 “leave to remain” cases – submitted by people who have not been granted refugee status or subsidiary protection but are appealing on humanitarian grounds to stay – is waiting to be worked through by the authorities, which at the current rate would take six years to clear. The backlog has built up despite a huge drop in new asylum applications. Last year 2,689 were received, down from 3,866 in 2008. Applications reached a peak of 11,634 in 2002.
These interminable delays in deciding who should be allowed to stay and who should be deported are at the root of the stand-off at Mosney between residents and the Department of Justice. “We don’t know what the future holds: we are in limbo,” declared one banner held up by frustrated protesters, one of whom has been living in Mosney for four years this week.
Sue Conlon, the chief executive of the Irish Refugee Council, says the system is failing to ensure that it does all it can to grant refugee status and leave to remain to those who need international protection. “The failure arises in different ways. Firstly, the legal services the State provides to aid asylum seekers are not provided early enough in the process to assist the decision maker to have all the necessary facts before they make a decision.
“An individual, even if they have access to legal aid, is left to complete the questionnaire themselves and attend the interview themselves with only brief advice. In the UK, lawyers help to draw up statements on behalf of clients, and they attend interviews – or if they can’t are provided with tape recordings of them,” says Conlon, who was an immigration lawyer in Britain for 22 years.
Lawyers working in the asylum system say legal aid is targeted at the appeal procedure at the Refugee Appeals Tribunal rather than at the initial application stage to the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner. This has helped create a system that rejects almost all asylum applications at the first stage; these are subsequently appealed to the tribunal. And judicial reviews are clogging up the courts. Two High Court judges will sit during the September break this year to try to clear a backlog of 550 asylum cases.
The new Immigration, Residence and Protection Bill, which was published this month, should help to resolve this problem by creating a single procedure for deciding asylum claims. This would enable deciding officers to consider all grounds for giving a person leave to remain in the State at the first decision stage, rather than waiting for appeals to be lodged. But the Bill is complex, and there is no guarantee it will pass into law. Two previous attempts by the Government to pass an immigration law have failed in recent years.
Conlon also believes the philosophy guiding the system is unfair. “There is a presumption that someone claiming international protection doesn’t need it and is therefore lying or embellishing their claim. And if the process starts with a negative assumption from the outset it is very difficult to overcome that and show you are someone telling the truth and needing protection,” she says.
According to an EU report published last year, the Republic granted protection to 4 per cent of asylum applicants at the initial decision stage and 7 per cent on appeal. Only Greece had a lower acceptance rate in the EU. The first-stage acceptance rate has fallen even farther in the first five months of 2010, with 14 recommendations for refugee status out of 1,014 applications – an acceptance rate of barely more than 1 per cent.
The Government says that a cornerstone of the Republic’s approach to asylum is its continued commitment to the 1951 Geneva Convention on the status of refugees.
“At the same time, we have been determined to address on an ongoing basis the high level of abuse of our asylum process by people seeking to gain entry to the State for purposes other than protection,” the Department of Justice said in a statement. “The Irish asylum system compares with the best in the world in terms of fairness, decision-making, determination structures and support services for asylum seekers, including access to legal advice.”
Non-governmental organisations do not agree, and have grave concerns about the direct-provision system for accommodating asylum seekers, as well as about the anomalies and delays in the decision-making process.
The direct-provision system was set up in 2000 as an emergency measure to deal with a spike in applications. But 10 years later more than 6,000 people live in a network of 52 centres across the country. Almost half of asylum seekers have stayed in the centres for more than three years, typically sharing rooms with several other people and having no access to a kitchen to prepare food.
Free Legal Advice Centres told an Oireachtas committee this week that the system was breaching the human rights of the people it was supposed to be protecting. “The direct-provision system treats those who are living in hostels like units to be administered rather than people,” says Noeline Blackwell, the centres’ director general. “We must remember that many of these people will already have experienced forced separation from their loved ones in their countries of origin.”
The Government has also blocked asylum seekers from working or attending third-level education for fear it would create a “pull factor” and encourage economic migrants to flood into the country. It has joined Denmark in opting out of the EU directive on the reception of asylum seekers, which would have ensured that they could take a job if a decision on their case had not been taken after 12 months. All other EU states have signed up.
Bahroz Wakashi, an asylum seeker from Iran who has lived in Mosney since 2006, says this causes health problems for people waiting years for decisions on their cases. “A lot of people end up with psychological disorders, because they get stuck in the asylum system for so long. They are not allowed to work or go to college. All we can do is sit around,” he says.
With conditions like this, it is hardly surprising that asylum applications have dropped so dramatically in recent years. But it must be asked: are we providing adequate protection to those fleeing persecution?
