How the New Plan for Immigration will impact asylum seekers in the UK
On March 24th, the Home Office published its New Plan for Immigration which is said to be the biggest overhaul to the British asylum system in decades. While the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, has argued that this new plan will create a fairer and faster asylum system as well as help protect the most vulnerable, the overwhelming response by civil society groups, NGOs, and the UNHCR has been highly critical.
Most notably, the new plan would essentially create a two-tier asylum system based on how an asylum seeker entered the UK. Asylum seekers who enter the UK through “safe and legal routes” such as those who are resettled from refugee camps under government programs would be rewarded with indefinite leave to remain instead of the temporary five-year protection granted currently. They would also be granted more extensive family reunion rights. Worryingly, the government has not specified any targets on numbers of refugees to be resettled under these “safe and legal routes.”
Those who enter the UK via irregular routes or who have travelled through a safe third country before reaching the UK would be heavily penalized and have fewer rights granted to them. For asylum seekers who have travelled through a safe third country prior to entering the UK, the Home Office would be allowed to refuse to even consider their asylum claim as well as send these asylum seekers back to the third safe country.
The new plan would essentially create a two-tier asylum system based on how an asylum seeker entered the UK.
However, it is unclear how the Home Office plans to do this. Given Brexit, the UK can no longer use the Dublin Regulation which allowed the UK to send asylum seekers back to the first EU country they entered. If the Home Office is serious about this plan, the government will have to negotiate agreements with every individual country they wish to send asylum seekers back to, a task to which so far there has been no progress.
When removal is not possible, asylum seekers who have entered via irregular routes will only receive a new temporary protection status instead of full refugee status. This new status would not guarantee an automatic right to settle and also would allow the Home Office to regularly assess the asylum seeker for removal. Furthermore, those with temporary protection status would also be limited in their family reunion rights and access to benefits.
The new plan does not account that many of the people traveling to the UK via irregular routes are highly vulnerable asylum seekers willing to risk their lives to seek asylum. What’s more is that the Home Secretary appeared to class all people traveling via irregular routes as “economic migrants” during her statement to Parliament, which is simply untrue.
It should also be noted that the Refugee Convention does not oblige asylum seekers to apply for asylum in the first safe country they enter nor does it permit discrimination on the basis of how someone entered the country.
The New Plan For Immigration would also make a significant change to the substantive law by reinstating the split standard of proof for asylum claims. Claimants would first have to prove on the balance of probabilities that “they are who they say they are and that they are experiencing genuine fear of persecution”. Following this, the decision-maker would have to consider “whether the claimant is likely to face persecution if they return to their country of origin” using the reasonable likelihood standard of proof. This split standard of proof was used in the 90s before the courts ruled that the split was unnecessary and overly complex and ruled in favor of a blanket standard of proof of a reasonable likelihood. Besides the legal hassle this creates, it also raises the standard of proof for a substantial bulk of an applicant’s claim and is likely to make it more difficult for asylum seekers to make successful claims.
The new plan does not account that many of the people traveling to the UK via irregular routes are highly vulnerable asylum seekers willing to risk their lives to seek asylum.
While claiming to promote a “fair but firm” stance towards immigration, the New Plan for Immigration will make it more difficult for those with genuine asylum claims to seek asylum in the UK and heavily penalize those who enter through irregular routes, which currently constitutes the majority of asylum seekers in the UK. The vision set out in the new plan is not one that promotes protection for those forced to flee their homes but rather makes it more difficult to do so and contributes to the hostile and negative outlook the UK government has towards asylum seekers and refugees.
