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List of Written Evidence 1 List of written evidence Submitting organisation or individual Page 1 Migration Watch 2 2 His Honour Judge Henry Hodge OBE, Office of the Chief Adjudicator, Immigration Appellate Authority 21 3 The Honourable Mr Justice Ouseley, President, Immigration Appeal Tribunal 22 4 Citizens Advice 25 5 The Children’s Society 34 6 Wackenhut 43 7 Refugee Council 44 8 Asylum Welcome 47 9 Refugee Children’s Consortium 51 10 Immigration Advisory Service 56 11 JCWI 62 12 Council on Tribunals 69 13 Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association 73 14 Lord Chancellor’s Department 79 15 Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture 101 16 JUSTICE 105 17 Refugee Action 113 18 The Law Society 116 19 Zimbabwe Association 121 20 Legal Services Commission 123 21 Asylum Aid 137 22 Bail for Immigration Detainees (BID) 143 23 Refugee Legal Centre 149 24 Legal Action Group 156 25 Council of Immigration Judges 162 26 Law Reform Committee of the Bar Council 169 27 Association of Members of the Immigration Appeal Tribunal(AMIAT) 172 28 Ben Hoare Solicitors 179 29 Tamil Welfare Association of Newham (TWAN) 181 30 Office of the Immigration Services 184 31 Department for Constitutional Affairs 198 32 UKvisas 205 2 Evidence submitted by Migration Watch (AIA 1) SUMMARY 1. To be humane, an asylum system must be swift and efficient - welcoming those who qualify and removing those refused before they put down roots in Britain. Migrationwatch UK do not believe that, given the huge number of asylum seekers now coming to Britain, this can be achieved within the present legal framework. We advocate withdrawal from the 1951 Geneva Convention and, if necessary, from the European Convention on Human Rights but we recognise that these matters are outside the Terms of Reference of the Committee. 2. Within the present framework, we recommend: (a) The abolition of the Immigration Appeals Tribunal (b) Greater use by the Home Office of the Exclusion Clauses in the Refugee Convention. (c) Statute Law should make it clear that procedure in asylum appeals should be inquisitorial, not adversarial. (d) The quality of Home Office representation should be improved. (e) The Lord Chancellors Department should be invited to publish the full costs of the present system, including the costs of the Courts and their administrative support. INTRODUCTION 3. These are the submissions of Migrationwatch UK, an independent non-political body established in 2002 to monitor and express views on the problems of immigration into the United Kingdom. The author is Harry Mitchell QC, a member of the Advisory Council of Migration Watch. 4. Writing now in the first person, I am a Queen's Counsel and spent most of my working life as a lawyer in industry, retiring from full time employment in 1992 from the position of Company Secretary of Wellcome plc, parent company of a major pharmaceutical group which was taken over by Glaxo in 1995 and is now part of GlaxoSmithKline. Shortly before retirement I took up a part time appointment as an immigration adjudicator which I held until I retired from the post in October 2002. I normally sat as an adjudicator for up to 50 days annually and during my service in that capacity heard some hundreds of appeals, mainly asylum from 1994 onwards but also many non-asylum appeals in marriage, fiancée, student, visitor and other cases. In 1992 when I started there were just the 1971 and 1988 Immigration Acts, asylum appeals were few and were normally heard by full time adjudicators. Asylum appeals were placed on a statutory basis for the first time by the Immigration and Asylum Appeals Act 1993. There then followed in quick succession the Immigration and Asylum Acts 1996 and 1999, which brought about major transformations in the law. A further most important enactment was the Human Rights Act 1998, incorporating the European Convention on Human Rights into United Kingdom law and giving asylum appeals in particular a whole new dimension. In addition to all this legislation there was a steady flow of subordinate legislation, in particular revised Immigration Rules and 3 new Procedure Rules which came into force in 2000. There were also many important decisions by the House of Lords and Court of Appeal on immigration and we as adjudicators also had to take note of the more significant decisions of the Immigration Appeal Tribunal. Throughout my ten years as an adjudicator we were all having to learn new law continuously. The Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 received Royal Assent in early November 2002, after I had retired. It very substantially revises the existing law and its provisions on appeals, replacing those in the 1999 Act, come into force in April 2003, according to my understanding. The appeals provisions in the 1999 Act were brought into force on 2 October 2000, and will have been in force for just two and a half years before they are repealed and replaced by significantly different legislation. This is a measure of the continuing turmoil with which the Immigration Appellate Authorities have had to cope for the past ten years. THE BACKGROUND 5. The future of the immigration appeals system has to be considered against a background of a rising tide of asylum seekers, now exceeding 100,000 annually, the problems which they create and the mounting level of public concern. To judge from my own experience and that of other adjudicators, very few of these people are genuinely seeking asylum. I remind the Committee that to support an asylum claim an applicant/appellant has to show that if he is returned to his country of origin he will have a well-founded fear of persecution putting his life or liberty in danger for one or other of the reasons given in Article 33 of the 1951 Geneva Convention, viz race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. The expression "bogus asylum seekers" has aroused at times righteous indignation in certain quarters, but it is a fair description of most appellants who come before adjudicators. In my own time as an adjudicator, the workload came to consist almost exclusively of asylum appeals from 1994 onwards. I heard some hundreds of asylum appeals between 1994 and 2002 and allowed around 20. This is a measure of the proportion of genuine asylum claims. In considering statistics on this subject a distinction needs to be drawn between persons allowed to remain in this country because they are judged, either by the Home Office on original application or later on appeal, to be genuine refugees and those who are not so judged but who are nevertheless granted Exceptional Leave to Remain (ELR). The Home Office has in recent years resorted to granting ELR to asylum seekers arriving from countries such as Somalia and Afghanistan because of the degree of chaos, the lack of effective government in those countries and the practical difficulty or in some cases impossibility of returning people to them. The numbers were as follows: 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 3,115 3,910 2,465 11,475 21,175 19,850 6. Most asylum appeals are dismissed on grounds of lack of credibility of the evidence provided by the appellant. Adjudicators are aware that in large numbers of cases appellants have made use of criminals around the world who make a substantial living out of smuggling people into the United Kingdom. The appellants and members of their families have often collected thousands of pounds to pay for the services of these criminals. They may be provided with false passports 4 and often with false stories to support their claims. On the instructions of these agents they regularly destroy their passports en route so as to make it more difficult for them to be deported. According to Home Office evidence to the Home Affairs Committee, over 80% of port asylum applicants and 90% of in-country applicants are found to be without identity documents. In order that the Committee may have a better idea of the work of an adjudicator in dealing with asylum appeals I am appending to these submissions at Annex A paragraphs showing in summary form the bases on which most appeals are dismissed. 7. A constant diet of asylum appeals goes a long way to making adjudicators cynical about human nature and the readiness of so many people from all over the world to tell lies or otherwise try to deceive the authorities of this country in pursuit of their aim, which in most cases is economic betterment, often linked with a wish to join other members of family who are already here. A further factor which seriously damages the morale of adjudicators, Home Office staff and others involved on the official side in coping with the flood of asylum seekers is the very low rate of deportations. (Removals are running at the rate of less than 10,000 applicants a year). Each case is considered individually, first by the Home Office and then at least by the adjudicator if not by the Tribunal and other courts at subsequent stages of the appeal process, all at enormous public expense. At the end of it, most appellants have been refused and have exhausted their rights of appeal but no action is taken to remove them from the United Kingdom. We are bound to ask ourselves what public good is served by this elaborate and costly charade. I appreciate that any proposal to withdraw from the Refugee Convention or in any other way to reform the substantive law relating to immigration and asylum is outside the remit of the Committee.
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