May 10, 2003	Saturday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 7, 1424

LONDON: Tony Blair will give a strong push to Britain’s plans to send most of Europe’s asylum seekers to an offshore processing centre somewhere like Russia or Albania when he gets to the European summit in Greece next month. But what are the actual chances of this plan, developed by the UK Home Secretary, David Blunkett, getting the European approval it needs?

Around London the scheme is said to fall into the “Tony wants” category of policy priorities and Blunkett has been keen to claim he has already secured “substantial support” for the British plan for “protection zones” somewhere beyond the EU’s newly-drawn eastern border.

But behind the scenes strong opposition is already developing. The UN high commission for refugees, whose participation is expected to be crucial to the success of any plan, has privately made clear it has strong reservations.

Ruud Lubbers, the UN’s high commissioner for refugees, agrees with Blunkett that more needs to be done to create “safe havens” in regions close to the countries most refugees are fleeing from. Indeed the UNHCR’s own “convention plus” plans advocate such havens, raising the possibility of refugee resettlement programmes in Europe on a much larger scale than today.

But Lubbers has also made clear that he will only support a joint EU processing centre if it is only for those asylum seekers from “safe” whitelist countries and therefore most likely to be economic migrants. It also has to be somewhere within, not outside, Europe’s borders.

The UNHCR intervention is a determined attempt to undermine the Blunkett plan but he may yet make some serious headway. It is not as though the EU has never discussed this before. Indeed, the Danes floated the idea of blocking access to Europe to all asylum seekers but those with prior approval as long ago as 1986 when Danish diplomats set up shop in neighbouring Croatia to deal with the refugee crisis in Bosnia. The Dutch have also tried to put the idea on the EU’s agenda.

Three years ago the then British home secretary, Jack Straw, put forward a much more respectable scheme for a new international asylum settlement. But he was careful to couch it in terms of making it possible for asylum seekers to get access to European protection without making a hazardous and illegal 3,000-mile journey hidden in the back of a lorry. He was also keen to ensure that, unlike the Blunkett plan, asylum seekers who did make it to Britain could stay in the country while their claims were considered.

One consequence of the Straw initiative was that the EU commissioned a new two-year feasibility study by the Danes. It reported last year and its closely argued conclusions make interesting reading. It says that if Europe’s asylum system is “undesirable, so is the maximalist solution of EU-operated processing centres in the region of crisis, providing for a unified central procedure and dispersal among EU member states, and representing the only avenue to protection in the EU”.

The study, by the Danish Centre for Human Rights for the European commission, said political support for “such a demanding solution appears unrealistic at least within the foreseeable future”. The 250- page report went into the idea in some detail. The legal problems involved in a country denying asylum seekers access to their territory under European human rights law would be hard to solve.

The practical difficulties include the risk of the centres attracting vast numbers of applicants and in deciding which EU country would take responsibility for ensuring that those who were rejected at the offshore processing centre were sent back to their country of origin. There was also little evidence that third countries would be willing to host new processing centres.

The study said there was evidence from a similar Swiss “protected entry” scheme me that it could work without massively boosting the numbers trying to get into Europe as long as it operated alongside existing asylum systems, not instead of them.

“Taken together, these are compelling reasons not to pursue the maximalist approach further,” concluded the two-year EU study. In the face of such evidence will Mr Blunkett make any headway with his new scheme?

A Demos pamphlet, co-written by a Dutch asylum expert, suggests some of these difficulties could be overcome by opening up more legal migration routes into Europe at the same time. There has also been a big change in the political climate on asylum across Europe since Mr Straw put forward his modest proposal. In the capitals of Europe there are growing fears that asylum has become an issue capable of leading to the electoral collapse of even the most entrenched left social democrat government. Last week’s limited advances by the British National party in the local elections fuelled that anxiety in Mr Blair’s office.

It is this fear that lies behind Tony Blair’s dramatic commitment to halve asylum applications to the UK by September and his determination to push this asylum no matter how daft the idea of sending them all to Albania or Russia may sound. Nobody knows yet whether the EU will line up behind Blair or Lubbers on this issue in Greece.

But Blair was prepared to take time out at the height of the Iraq crisis to ensure it is debated next month. His fear of the new political power of asylum is echoed around Europe but what will be truly alarming is if that anxiety leads to an agreement to lock out of the EU all asylum seekers but those who have got here by prior appointment.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.