RIGHTS-FRANCE: Doors Closing on Asylum Seekers

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Aug 2 2002 (IPS) - The French government is proposing measures to let in fewer asylum seekers and to get failed applicants out faster.

New proposals include airport tribunals for speedy processing of applications, and the use of charter flight for mass expulsions.

“Today, the administration needs up to 18 months to decide whether the demand of asylum of a given person is justified or not,” Chirac said in a television interview. “This is absurd. Such a procedure simply does not work, we need to get a decision within a month.”

Minister of the interior Nicolas Sarkozy took steps towards meeting that aim at a meeting with police and other officials on July 30. Sarkozy said the present system is “careless and lax”.

Official figures indicate that about 48,000 persons a year demand asylum at the Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons. Currently about 70,000 applications are being processed.

A new bill is expected to be presented to Parliament four weeks from now, and is expected to become law by the end of the year.

Under the new law the list of countries France considers democratic will be enlarged, according to official sources. Applications from nationals of these countries will be declared “obviously unfounded”.

The new countries are expected to include Mali, Ghana and Bangladesh, from where most asylum seekers come to France. Others likely to be included in the list are South Africa, Botswana, Gabon, Maurice Island, Estonia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Mongolia and Costa Rica.

The government also proposes to extend detention for asylum seekers from the present 12 days to several weeks to facilitate the expulsion of failed applicants.

Sarkozy has ordered the reopening of special tribunals at the Charles de Gaulle airport near Paris to tighten control over migrants entering France. These tribunals are due to begin functioning within weeks. “We have already asked the minister for justice to authorise prosecutors and judges to have their offices at the airport,” Sarkozy says.

Airport tribunals used to function earlier, but they were closed by the former Socialist led government, following complaints by lawyers and prosecutors who described the tribunals as “justice without due process.”

Bruno Marcus, president of the French Union of Lawyers says airport tribunals bring “unacceptable transfer of justice into a police-controlled environment.” The government, he says, “obviously sees prosecutors and judges as an obstacle to the mass expulsion of refugees.”

Sarkozy also plans to reintroduce use of charter flights for mass expulsion of asylum seekers whose applications have been rejected, and for removal of illegal immigrants. Such flights introduced in the early nineties had provoked angry protests from human rights groups.

These groups are protesting again. “The French government wants to turn its back on its global responsibilities in protection of political refugees,” the Forum Refugees said in a statement. The Forum brings together human rights organisations, legal experts and representatives of immigrant groups.

New proposals are “a totalitarian project by a government that sees all social illness as solely provoked by foreigners,” says Philippe Boisnard, a psychoanalyst who supports refugees and immigrants. “The questioning of the right to asylum by minister Sarkozy is founded upon the illusory vision of France as a closed body that does not support contact with subjects it sees as exotic or alien.”