Open%20borders%20The%20case%20against%20immigration%20controls%20-%20Teresa%20Hayter

Refugees: Tightening the Screw 99
travelled through, which may or may not be ‘safe’ in reality. Germany and
France changed their constitutions to enable them to return asylum seekers
to neighbouring states. The only way to be sure of avoiding this is to claim
‘in-country’, when the authorities must finally consider a claim. Frances
Webber, in Crimes of Arrival, cites, as examples of what can happen to those
who claim asylum at port of entry,
the 17-year-old Somali boy who had witnessed his mother being killed and had fled
via Italy to join his only surviving relative in the UK, who was returned to Italy. Or the
Somali man with shrapnel lodged in his head, given painkillers and put back on the
plane to Italy ... the examples are legion.
Detention centres and prisons in Britain contain people who are bemused
and distressed because they have been picked up and detained when they
were on their way to another country. Worse, in early 1999 there were, in
addition to the 800 or so people detained under immigration rules, 450
people imprisoned in ordinary prisons, including Wormwood Scrubs and
Holloway, with criminal convictions for travelling on forged papers; most of
them were picked up at Heathrow on their way to claim asylum in the United
States or Canada, a claim that their criminal records would now cause to be
ruled out, and had been advised by duty solicitors to plead guilty to shorten
their sentences. In July 1999 two judges in the High Court, in response to
cases brought by an Algerian, an Iraqi Kurd and an Albanian, ruled that the
government was in breach of its obligations under article 31 of the Geneva
Convention which states that asylum seekers should not be penalised for
entering a country illegally; Lord Justice Simon Brown said that:
It must be hoped that these challenges will mark a turning point in the crown’s
approach to the prosecution of refugees for travelling on false passports. Article 31
must henceforth be honoured.
The judge added that the combination of visa requirements and carrier’s
liability ‘has made it well nigh impossible for refugees to travel to countries
of refuge without false passports’. Criminal prosecution of refugees holding
false documents has now been put on hold. But those still in prison were told
they could not simply be released but would have to reopen their cases
through the courts. One of the ‘reasons’ the Home Office gives for detaining
refugees continues to be their use of false documents.
Most asylum seekers have little idea what they ought to do on arrival in
Britain. An African who later got refugee status went through immigration
control on arrival, spent the night sleeping rough in Trafalgar Square, and
eventually managed to get to Croydon and apply for asylum there. Refugees
may not wish to approach uniformed officials until they have taken advice
from friends. Usually their only source of advice before arrival is the agents
who have brought them to Britain, whose interests may not be the same as
those of the refugees. Some are told by these agents that they will get some
money back if they go through immigration and hand over their false