NEW YORK, July 8 (RIA Novosti) – The UN refugee agency has warned of asylum seekers being handcuffed at UK airports and facing other “extremely distressing circumstances” upon arrival and called on the government to change.
“Asylum seekers who come to the UK have often experienced extremely distressing circumstances which have caused them to flee,” Dan McNorton, a spokesman for the agency, UNHCR, told RIA Novosti.
“To be led off to a detention center – sometimes in handcuffs – as soon as they arrive, is far from a humane way of being treated,” he added.
UNHCR has identified the UK, along with Hungary, Indonesia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Thailand and Zambia, as a country in which it aims to change the current policy of placing asylum seekers in detention.
“We would like to see changes in relation to the deprivation of liberty of those seeking asylum, more time to allow for accurate decision-making and an end to asylum seekers from conflict-affected countries being detained,” McNorton underlined.
“Seeking asylum is lawful and the exercise of a fundamental human right. The detention of asylum-seekers as a routine response should be avoided – these are people who need protection. We are ready to work with governments on this, particularly to end the practice of detaining asylum-seeking children,” said Volker Türk, UNHCR’s head of international protection.
Asylum applications in the UK peaked at 84,130 in 2002 and then declined to 19,865 in 2011, according to Oxford University’s Migration Observatory. Asylum claims are below the European average in the UK, with 0.41 applications per 1,000 inhabitants, compared to 0.65 on the continent.
