Huge rise in unresolved asylum cases in UK revealed

[Al-khiyal]

Huge rise in unresolved asylum cases revealed

February 26, 2010 -- Labour's record on tackling asylum faces a fresh onslaught today over figures that show a new backlog of 30,000 cases and a warning by the government's immigration watchdog that its targets are currently "unachievable". John Vine also makes clear that a special five-year exercise which began in 2006 to clear the legacy of 450,000 unresolved asylum cases is now unlikely to meet its July 2011 target completion date. The setbacks mean that despite progress the Labour government will go into the general election campaign unable to claim that the asylum system has been fixed after John Reid famously declared the Home Office's immigration directorate "unfit for purpose" in May 2006.

The report from Vine, his first on asylum as the UK Border Agency's independent inspector, says there is no belief among frontline immigration staff that their official target of resolving 90% of new asylum applications within six months by the end of next year is achievable. He says his inspectors found that at the end of July last year there were already 29,474 cases that had not been concluded within six months. Although no specific figures have been published the backlog appears to have carried on growing in the last six months. Staff had been unable to hit a target of resolving 60% of asylum claims within six months and were struggling to get the monthly completion rate consistently above 45%. In one UKBA region staff had even started to "stockpile" cases dating back to March, April and May so that they could focus on the new cases in June in an attempt to meet the unrealistic target.

Ministers decided in 2006 to "set aside" 450,000 outstanding legacy asylum cases so that a fresh start could be made on new applications. But Vine also reports that this special five-year backlog clearance exercise is also not making as much progress as hoped. He said that while considerable progress has been made in resolving 235,000 of the legacy of older cases there are unlikely to clear up the rest by the target date of summer 2011. He said that to meet this target 11,000 cases a month need to be resolved but his latest figures show that only 4,500 a month were being dealt with during 2009. Vine reveals that this problem remains despite ministers changing the rules to allow anyone to stay who has already been here six to eight years rather than the publicly advertised 10 to 12 years. Up to 40,000 cases have been dealt with under this rule change. Vine said the clear targets had driven an improvement in the UK Border Agency's performance but he had significant concerns about its ability to maintain that progress in the face of increasingly challenging targets. He said asylum caseworkers were dealing with some of the most vulnerable people in society and it was important to strike the right balance between targets and quality decision-making: "We should remember that, first and foremost, this is about people's lives."

Lin Homer, UKBA chief executive, said last night: "The UK Border Agency is concluding asylum cases faster than ever before, with the majority concluded within six months, down from an average of 22 months in 1997. We are working to ensure there is a realistic plan for dealing with all asylum claims that have not been concluded within six months." She said that special teams had been set up to deal with the new backlog of cases not resolved within six months and still believed that the targets of dealing of 90% of new claims within that time limit could be achieved by the end of next year. The Refugee Council said that the new asylum figures showed that 28% of asylum appeals were successful. Its chief executive, Donna Covey, said: "It is one thing to have targets, it is another to make them so unrealistic that not only are they not met but, crucially, they result in the wrong decision being made and an often lengthy appeals process."

[Al-khiyal]

Women fast-tracked to asylum denial

February 26, 2010 -- The UK Border Agency has published a report today showing that targets to speed up the asylum procedure are unachievable. The chief inspector, John Vine, said that the agency deals with vulnerable people and "we should remember that, first and foremost, this is about people's lives". But how do hundreds of women, including vulnerable ones with complex cases, end up in a Kafkaesque procedure known as the detained fast track (DFT) which is designed for straightforward cases with a quick resolution?

That's the question posed in a new report by Human Rights Watch published this week, Fast-tracked unfairness: Detention and denial of women asylum seekers in the UK. Our research has shown that women with complex asylum claims – often based on family violence, rape or trafficking – are now being shunted through this fast-track system, even though their cases are inherently not capable of quick resolution. Women such as Fatima H from Pakistan, who says her locally powerful husband, a man with close links to the police, subjected her to a sustained regime of domestic violence from which she had no way of escaping locally. Or Xiuxiu L from China, who says she was trafficked into the UK after being held as a sex slave for five years. Or Aabida M from Algeria, who said her affair outside of marriage led to threats from her family to kill her.

Once a woman is in the DFT system the odds are stacked against her. She is taken to Yarl's Wood and one or two days later interviewed for asylum. If refused – and in 2008 (the most recent full year figures available) 96% of claims were refused at first instance – she has two days in which to appeal. The appeal is then heard within 11 days. From start to finish the whole process takes two weeks. This gives insufficient time to assemble evidence or get expert opinions to support a claim. In 2008, 91% of appeals were rejected. The Home Office claims that the statistics show that the system is working. Around a quarter of cases put into DFT are removed from it before the initial decision. Officials say that only cases capable of quick resolution pass through DFT. But solicitors and NGOs that provide legal representation say that re-routing back to the standard asylum system is usually due to quick intervention on their part and that many complex cases remain in DFT.

Human Rights Watch did not set out to assess whether Fatima, Xiuxiu, Aabida (not their real names) and other women in DFT should be granted asylum. We consider only whether their claims should have been put into the DFT procedure in the first place – and whether DFT gives them a decent chance to make their case. What many of these women have in common is that their claims are inherently complicated, involving their own states' failure to protect them from gender-based violence and abuse. Organisations that provide services to refugee women estimate that more than half of all women seeking asylum in the UK are survivors of sexual violence. That the trauma of rape can inhibit women from seeking help is recognised by the UK's courts – but an asylum-seeker is expected to open up immediately to total strangers about her experiences. If she delays it may be too late. And she has to do this while in detention, quite probably to a legal representative she has only spoken to briefly over the phone and a case officer she might view as hostile. Cases like this cannot be processed at breakneck speed. The UKBA has guidelines about complex gender-related cases – but these appear to be applied inconsistently.

None of this should be news to the UKBA and the Home Office. In August 2006 the Home Office's own asylum quality team reported that the referral mechanism to DFT was not "sufficiently robust or substantive enough to properly identify complex gender-related claims". In March 2008 UNHCR told the Home Office that DFT decisions often "fail to engage with the merits of the claim" and expressed concern about the speed of the process. In May 2009 the House of Commons home affairs committee said the government's aims of deterring fraudulent applications may disadvantage the often severely traumatised victims of trafficking. By the end of 2011 UKBA aims to conclude 90% of new asylum cases within six months of application. But it is neither reasonable nor in accordance with the UK's obligations under international refugee law to seek to achieve this target by dint of using an inherently unfair procedure. The correct test of an asylum system is that those in need of protection receive it, not the speed with which they are rejected.

[Al-khiyal]

Fast-tracked unfairness:
Detention and denial of women asylum seekers in the UK

(.pdf file)