Amnesty slams Home Office's 'unreasoned' asylum decisions

Home Office asylum decisions are based on inaccurate and out-of-date country information, unreasoned decisions about people's credibility and a failure to properly consider complex torture cases, according to a highly critical report published today by Amnesty International.

The report, 'Get it right: How Home Office decision making fails refugees', is based on analysis of over 170 Home Office asylum refusal letters received by Amnesty International in 2003.

The agency said that government figures show that the Home Office gets the initial decision wrong on nearly 14,000 asylum cases in the last reported calendar year (2002), meaning around 1-in-5 cases are overturned after costly appeals. This figure rises to nearly 4-in-10 cases from Somalia, and more than 1-in-3 Sudanese and Eritrean asylum applications.

Amnesty International UK Director Kate Allen said: "Getting an asylum decision wrong is not like a clerical error on a tax bill or parking fine. Wrongly refusing someone's claim could mean returning them to face torture or execution. These are life-or-death decisions and the Home Office is getting one in five of them wrong.

"Our study of Home Office refusal letters to asylum seekers shows a staggering lack of accurate information about the situations asylum seekers are fleeing from. This is compounded by a negative culture that means many claims simply aren't taken seriously.

"The government should focus on improving decision-making from the start, leading to speedier results and fewer costly appeals."

The organisation also said that plans announced by Home Secretary David Blunkett last year would reduce rights to appeal, with a new one-tier appeals body that is beyond the scrutiny of the law courts. New guidelines will also severely limit the amount of legal aid granted to asylum applicants, making the process of lodging a claim and an appeal even more difficult, it said.

Amnesty International called on the government to urgently review its decision-making process to ensure that it gets more decisions right from the very start.

Home Office Minister Beverley Hughes welcomed the report and said that a number of steps had already been taken to improve the quality of initial decision-making in asylum cases.

However, she added: "Caseworkers must be able to continue to robustly assess claims on their individual merits if we are to properly address the abuse of the system and ensure it works in the interests of genuine refugees."

(gmcg)