Guterres: EU must set its asylum-seekers free

By David Cronin

Date: 28/07/05

The new UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has called on EU governments to stop detaining asylum-seekers in most circumstances.

Former Portuguese premier Ant-nio Guterres last week paid his first visit to the Brussels institutions since his appointment as head of the UN's refugee agency in mid-June.

Guterres said that he was "very concerned" by the practice followed by several EU states of detaining significant numbers of asylum-seekers while their applications were assessed. According to Guterres, the cases in which asylum-seekers might be locked up were "very limited".

Guidelines on detention, drawn up by the UNHCR in 1995 and subsequently updated, query the reason cited by many countries for detaining asylum-seekers: that they would otherwise abscond. The recommendations say that there must be some "substantive basis" for drawing such a conclusion in individual cases.

The guidelines suggest it is not acceptable to detain asylum-seekers solely because they do not have the travel documents required by border posts. People fleeing persecution, the UNHCR recognises, often have little choice other than to leave their native land without a passport or to use falsified travel documents. Provided that individuals co-operated in attempts to establish their identity, detention should never be "routine".

A series of reports published by Amnesty International last month listed concerns in three EU countries - the UK, Spain and Italy - particularly over poor medical care and austere and unhygienic conditions. The human rights group alleged that tens of thousands of asylum applicants are detained in the UK each year, with the resulting trauma often leading to mental illness. In Italy, it detailed instances where detainees had been subjected to physical assault and had been hindered from gaining access to the asylum determination process.

Guterres also appealed to politicians and the media not to conflate terrorists and asylum-seekers.

"Refugees are not terrorists," he said. "Refugees are many times the first victims of terror. If you want to be a terrorist and enter a country, the most stupid thing you could do would be to seek asylum as then you would be put on the spot. If you want to be a terrorist, you need to be anonymous.

"There is no need to spread confusion between the need to fight terrorism and negative attitudes towards asylum."

Contrary to claims by some politicians that Europe has been 'flooded' with asylum-seekers, data released by the UNHCR last month found that at 9.2 million, the number of refugees in the world in 2004 was the lowest in almost 25 years.

But that figure does not include people who are 'internally displaced' in their country because of conflict or those who are defined as 'stateless'. The total number of people in that category rose from 5.3m to 7.6m in 2003-04. The increase was largely as a result of violence in western Sudan and an increased estimate of the number of uprooted people in Colombia.

The total tally for refugees also does not include four million Palestinians. Responsibility for attending to their welfare falls primarily within the remit of the UN's Relief Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, rather than the UNHCR.

The newly-appointed UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), former Portuguese Prime Minister António Guterres, called on EU Governments to stop detaining asylum-seekers in most circumstances.