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

xxiv Open Borders
2002, the government made a proposal to the European Union, entitled New
Vision, that asylum seekers who make it to Britain and other EU countries
should be transferred, before their cases are considered, to two categories of
camp: ‘transit processing centres’ in states bordering, but outside, the European
Union, and, apparently for people whose claims had been rejected but who
could not be returned to their own countries, ‘regional protection areas’ in
‘refugee-producing’ regions. Both types of camp would be in effect prisons.
In the transit processing centres claims would be processed by the UNHCR.
The British government’s New Vision report states that: ‘As UNHCR would
be an independent body the only remedy would be an administrative review
of the decision, perhaps by a senior board on the papers only.’ These centres
would be designed, the British report stated, to act as a deterrent to persons
abusing the asylum system. As Amnesty International commented in a
mimeo document entitled ‘Unlawful and Unworkable – Extra-territorial
Processing of Asylum Claims’, dated June 2003:
The real goal behind the proposals appears to be to reduce the number of spontaneous
arrivals in the UK and EU states by denying access to territory and shifting the asylumseekers
to processing zones outside the EU, where responsibility, enforceability and
accountability for refugee protection would be weak and unclear.
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) made an
almost equally shocking ‘counter-proposal’. This included the immediate
transfer of asylum seekers whose claims were considered ‘manifestly
unfounded’, on the grounds of their national origins, to closed ‘common
processing centres’, or in effect prisons, within the EU but near its borders,
where their claims would be processed with even fewer rights of appeal than
exist within most European countries. ‘No Borders’ and other protest groups
in Europe, which have already started a campaign against the Organisation
for International Migration, are now considering extending it to the UNHCR.
A Communication adopted by the EU Commission on 3 June 2003 was
cautious about the proposals, and the EU summit at Thessaloniki in Greece
in June 2003 rejected them. But they remain on the table.
The Amnesty International report makes clear that the proposals for transferring
asylum seekers to closed camps outside the countries in which they
have applied for asylum are likely to violate several international treaties. It
also comments that these are not the first attempts to ‘extra-territorialize’ asylum
procedures, referring for example to the treatment of Vietnamese refugees in
the 1980s and 1990s. The false assumption was made that they were
economic migrants and resulted in arbitrary, long term detention of Vietnamese
refugees who arrived in Hong Kong and elsewhere, and the forced repatriation
of many hundreds of them. Some, at least, had escaped torture and long
prison sentences for supposed anti-state activities in Vietnam (a novel called
The Ghost Locust by Heather Stroud, who spent six years working in the