Sir, - John Ballantine (November 13th) told of his offence at seeing asylum-seekers referred to as "refugees". I share his wish to separately define the two categories where appropriate - too often one sees headlines in some newspapers referring to the fate of asylum-seekers whose claims have been rejected using the term "refugee". Headlines such as "refugees facing expulsion" to describe the impending deportation of rejected asylum-seekers are not uncommon and are highly objectionable. This sort of journalism creates confusion in the public mind as to how a State is entitled to treat refugees.
However, Mr Ballantine's point is made in different terms. He says that to refer to asylum-seekers as refugees creates the false impression that their claims "have already been ratified by the State", which he feels is "blatantly not true". I would like t take this opportunity to correct Mr. Ballantine's misinterpretation of refugee status. The UNHCR handbook on "Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status" states that "a person is a refugee within the meaning of the 1951 Convention as soon as he fulfills the criteria contained in the definition. This would necessarily occur prior to the time at which his refugee status is formally determined."
A formal grant of refugee status is therefore merely declaratory of an existing fact. It follows that, in any given number of asylum-seekers, a proportion are refugees whether formally declared so or not.
Mr Ballantine objects in particular to the term refugee being used in the context of asylum seekers from Romania, Nigeria and Poland, which, he says, "are far from war-torn land[s]". It is worth noting, then, that Nigerians and Romanians are granted refugee status here, illustrating that "war-torn strife and terror" do not have to prevail for a person's human rights nevertheless to be so gravely at risk that they meet the refugee definition. - Yours, etc.,
Fiona Crowley, Refugee & Legal Officer, Amnesty International Irish Section, Fleet Street, Dublin 2.