No laughing matter

It is not apparent to me that these are suitable qualifications to justify your publishing a thoroughly intemperate and ill-informed article by him on the subject of failed asylum seekers (“Forsaking failed asylum seekers really is the last straw”, HT 12 November).

I am a lawyer who was for 10 years, until October 2002, a part-time immigration adjudicator. For the past 10 years I have been a board member of Sarsen Housing Association in Kennet district and was its chairman between 1995 and 2001.

Asylum applications are dealt with in accordance with the 1951 United Nations convention on the status of refugees. Under that convention the UK undertakes to afford protection to persons who can show that, if they are returned to their countries of origin, there is a serious degree of likelihood that they will face persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a particular social group.

Hardy asks why asylum seekers fail in their applications and answers his own question in a frivolous and irresponsible manner. Most applications fail because the applicants are unable to show that they are at risk of persecution in their countries of origin, even though the burden of proof which they have to discharge is a lenient one which acknowledges that they may have problems in producing adequate evidence. Most applicants are economic migrants trying to take advantage of the asylum system as a means of being allowed to remain in the UK.

Large numbers of their applications and subsequent appeals are rejected or dismissed because it becomes regrettably apparent they are telling lies in support of their cases. One of the main reasons why Parliament has spent so much time passing complex legislation on asylum and immigration is that there has been widespread abuse of the asylum system and it has been necessary to tighten up the law.

“Failed asylum seekers” are applicants who are unable to show that they are at risk of persecution in their countries of origin. However, successive governments have acknowledged that some countries of origin are in a state of chaos because of civil war or for other reasons and that it is therefore unsafe to return failed asylum seekers there. In recent years Liberia, Afghanistan and Somalia, among others, have fallen into this category. In such cases failed asylum seekers from those countries are granted humanitarian protection and allowed to remain in the UK for a limited period.

An article in the same issue, by Eleanor Snow, on the problems which failed asylum seekers have with accommodation, deals with the issue objectively and has regard to relevant facts. It complies with the standards one expects of contributions to your journal.

I regret that Jeremy Hardy’s article falls a long way below those standards.

Harry Mitchell QC, Marlborough, Wiltshire