REFUGEES: Human Rights Groups Accuse U.S., Canada of Refugee Dumping

By Haider Rizvi Reprint | | Print |

Haider Rizvi

WASHINGTON, Apr 12 1996 (IPS) - Refugees fleeing their home countries because of war, political violence, or state-sponsored terrorism will find it increasingly difficult to seek asylum in the United States and Canada.

Officials in Washington and Ottawa are likely to sign an agreement this month that imposes new restrictions on granting asylum to refugees.

“The intent of the new regulation is to discourage asylum shopping by asylum applicants,” says Phyllis Coven, director of the office of International Affairs at the U.S. Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS).

The proposed agreement denies asylum to anyone who does not arrive directly in the country where the applicant intends to seek asylum.

If, say, a Sri Lankan arrives in Canada to seek asylum but gets there via the United States because there is no direct flight, the applicant could be returned to the United States to have the asylum claim examined in that country.

Officials here assert that the agreement would discourage fake and fraudulent claims for asylum. They say the accord is designed to encourage applications for asylum in the country that offers the first opportunity for effective protection.

But human rights groups here describe the new policy as unwarranted and are urging the two governments to refrain from signing the accord.

“It will bring undue hardships for asylum seekers,” says Katie Hope, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Committee for Refugees, a Washington-based refugee rights advocacy group.

Others say the notion that the country of first arrival ought to be responsible for examining the asylum claim has been borrowed from European governments who fashioned the principle through two multilateral agreements — the Dublin Convention (1990) and the Schengen Agreement (1990).

“These agreements were based, not on any precedents in international law, but rather (as) an expedient arrangement to ease the transition toward abolishing internal border controls,” Bill Frelick, a senior policy analyst for the U.S. Committee for Refugees writes in a recently published research paper on asylum issues.

Schengen and Dublin “have caused an unseemly competition among the parties, as each tries to undo its neighbors in creating obstacles” to prevent political asylum seekers from first setting foot in its territory, Frelick says.

Human Rights groups have documented several cases in which people were denied asylum because of the ‘first arrival’ rule. In one of the cases documented by the European Council of Refugees and Exiles (ECRE), a Somali refugee traveling with five children was pushed out of four European countries.

The family arrived at Brussels airport May 29, 1994 and applied for asylum. They were immediately detained and subjected to an expedited procedure in which the application was turned down as fraudulent.

Belgian authorities returned them to Prague Jul. 8. The Czech Republic sent them in turn to the Bratislava airport in Slovakia because they had in their passport a genuine, but expired, visa allowing them to transit Slovakia.

The Slovak authorities detained the family at the airport, fed them one meal a day, while denying them access to a telephone or interpreter. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) discovered and interviewed them and found them to have a well-founded fear of persecution.

But despite UNHCR’s intervention, the Slovak authorities refused to register the applicants’ claim for asylum, arguing that the Somalis were tourists who had not applied for asylum. Slovakia insisted that they be deported to Ukraine, the country of first arrival.

On the night of Jul. 25, Slovak authorities put the family on a train to Kiev. At that point, UNHCR lost track of them.

The U.S. Committee for Refugees, Amnesty International, and several other human rights organisations campaigning against the signing of the U.S.-Canadian agreement say the accord contravenes international standards of refugee protection.

International principles of refugee protection were codified by UNHCR, which counts the United States and Canada among its 50 member governments.

Conclusion 15 reached by UNHCR’s Executive Committee says that “asylum should not be refused solely on the grounds that it could be sought from another state.”

No conclusion states that the country of first arrival ought to be responsible for examining asylum claims. Rather, the Executive Committee concludes that an asylum seeker’s wishes should be taken into account “as far as possible.”

Frelick contends that in the case of the United States and Canada, neither country has made a convincing case that asylum shopping is a real problem.

“Neither country has provided statistics to demonstrate that significant numbers of persons denied asylum in one country in fact travel to the other to apply for asylum,” he says, adding that the logic behind the agreement was nothing but an attempt to find “additional countries of first arrival where they can push asylum seekers back.”

According to the INS, more than 50,000 refugees applied for asylum in the United States last year, and 8,000 were granted political asylum. But, as Frelick asserts, the INS could not provide information on whether those 8,000 asylum seekers had traveled to the United States directly from their country in which they were being persecuted.