BRUSSELS: European Union leaders have been bombarded with warnings not to overdo their planned crackdown on illegal immigration at Friday’s (today) Seville summit.

Ruud Lubbers, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said on Wednesday, that the EU was right to put the issue at the top of its agenda but wrong to focus on closing borders and punishing poor countries.

Mary Robinson, the UN Human Rights Commissioner, also urged caution and a sense of proportion, saying that asylum applications in Europe had actually dropped, and were 7 per cent lower in the first three months of this year than in the final quarter of last.

The UN and charities are afraid that the EU governments are getting carried away by their own rhetoric after the string of electoral successes by far-right and anti-immigration parties.

Tony Blair strongly supports Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar’s plans to accelerate measures giving the EU common asylum and immigration policies.

Blair and Jacques Chirac of France discussed the issue in the hope that new measures could resolve the row about the Sangatte refugee camp near Calais.

EU leaders hope that the two-day summit will endorse proposals to strengthen frontier controls, including financial arrangements, and set a timetable for a common asylum policy.

But they will have more trouble agreeing to controversial proposals that link external aid to poor countries to their cooperation in the return of illegal immigrants.

Speaking on the eve of World Refugee Day, Lubbers, a former Dutch prime minister, said that “there is far too much about sealing borders, which will not be effective, and far too much about punishing countries which don’t take back their people.”

Far from punishing impoverished countries, the EU should be working with those countries to improve conditions there, he added.

Robinson said she was worried that public fears about immigrants could lead to the tougher handling of refugees and asylum seekers in police stations and holding stations.

The European Commission president, Romano Prodi, said the EU’s war on illegal immigration must not be waged at the expense of integrating much-needed legal migrants who were “a source of vitality and energy, which aging Europe needs.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.