09 February 2004	Monday	17 Zilhaj 1424

LONDON: Rights group Amnesty International accused Britain on Monday of putting asylum seekers' lives at risk by using out of date and inaccurate information to decide whether they should stay or be sent home.

Amnesty said the Home Office (interior ministry) was making ill-considered decisions about people's credibility and failed to properly consider complex torture cases.

"Getting an asylum decision wrong is not like a clerical error on a tax bill or a parking fine. Wrongly refusing someone's claim could mean returning them to face torture or execution," Amnesty International UK Director Kate Allen said.

"These are life or death decisions and the Home Office is getting one in five of them wrong." Always a hot political issue in Britain, asylum and immigration made a grim return to the headlines last week after 19 Chinese migrants, who were sent to gather shellfish in Morecambe Bay, northern England, were drowned by rising tides.

The Home Office said it had taken several steps to improve the quality of the information it uses, including using Amnesty's own reports, working with the United Nations' refugee agency and making more fact-finding visits to countries with large numbers of applicants.

For its report called "Get it Right: How Home Office decision making fails refugees", Amnesty studied more than 170 asylum refusal letters received by the group.

It called on the government to improve training of asylum caseworkers and set up a body to provide better information on asylum seekers' countries of origin.

Home Office minister Beverley Hughes said the ministry had set up an independent panel of experts to advise how the quality of country information could be improved and had invited Amnesty to take part. "However, the fact remains that the majority of asylum seekers reaching the UK are not genuine refugees - even taking into account those cases granted at appeal, 58 percent of cases are found not to be in need of international protection," she said.

"We will actively consider any further steps the new panel recommends to help ensure well-informed decisions are taken by caseworkers," the minister added.

Hughes said the ministry was also increasing the use of biometric testing to deal with cases where the asylum seekers have no documentation. The British embassy in Ethiopia said last month travellers from five east African countries would be fingerprinted when applying for British visas to stop the use of false identities and abuse of asylum rules. -Reuters