Officers 'decide in advance' to reject asylum seekers

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Gaby Hinsliff, political editor
Sunday July 24, 2005
The Observer

Asylum seekers are being 'inappropriately' turned away amid a climate of political pressure and hostile media coverage, an official watchdog has warned.
Mary Coussey is the independent race monitor appointed by the Home Office to oversee instances where the usual laws on discrimination are waived to allow the immigration service to do its job. That includes allowing immigration officers to treat nationals from 'priority countries' differently from everyone else at ports of entry.
Coussey found evidence of immigration officers apparently deciding in advance to reject someone then 'looking for evidence to justify a refusal'. She was even told by a couple of officers that they 'liked refusals' - turning suspicious entrants back at ports - because they thought it was more interesting than just letting people in.
Coussey's review of more than 40 asylum claims found evidence of 'inappropriate decision-making'. She said: 'Several refusal decisions were based on caseworkers' assumptions of what should have occurred, or on small discrepancies and inconsistencies in accounts of events, giving the impression that whatever the applicant's experience, some grounds for refusal would be found.'
Asylum seekers were being rejected if they had not sought medical treatment after alleged brutalities, even if they lived in war zones where it was impossible to get medical help, she said.
One applicant was told that an attack they had suffered, in which others had died, was so bad that 'it is not believed that you would have been able to survive'. Others were turned down on the basis of assumptions of what officers thought they might do themselves in the circumstances.
Calling for a more balanced public debate, Coussey said that 'hostile, inaccurate and derogatory' press coverage of asylum and immigration, plus 'comments by a few politicians', were having an impact. 'I do not doubt that this negative atmosphere can affect decision-making on individual cases, as it makes caution and suspicion more likely,' she added.
Repeated references to abuse of the system and reducing asylum applications - which Tony Blair and then Home Secretary David Blunkett promised to do before the election - 'tend to reinforce popular misconceptions that abuse is enormous in scale', when it was only a small proportion of entrants.
Home Secretary Charles Clarke accepted 'many of the comments on inappropriate and speculative reasoning' by officials, but said the majority of decisions appeared to be correct. He rejected Coussey's calls for an independent element in decision-making.
However, the Refugee Council warned that the report, which was published on the Home Office website on the day of the 7 July London bombings, said it helped to explain why so many rejected claimants appealed - thus delaying their removal from the country.
'The examples cited in the report of refusals made by Home Office caseworkers are jaw-dropping, but what is truly shocking is that the report contains so many of them,' said a spokeswoman. 'The report paints a picture of a system dominated by a "culture of disbelief", in which refusals are the norm and stories of persecution are only ever accepted grudgingly.'
For some nationalities, such as Somalians and Eritreans, more than a third of those rejected have the decision overturned on appeal. The Refugee Council spokeswoman said that unless decisions were made clearly and fairly in the first place, the government would struggle to reduce delays in the system and speed up removals.