EU to move on a common asylum policy

The European Commission will bring forward proposals to harmonise the treatment of asylum-seekers throughout the EU by the summer. A spokesman for the Commission said yesterday the proposals will be part of a package of measures envisaged by the Tampere summit last year and seen as the building blocks of a common EU immigration, asylum and visa policy.

The Commission intends to create a scoreboard system, similar to that used to complete the single market, in order to put peer pressure on member-states to fall in line.

Currently, rules on asylum and treatment of asylum-seekers vary widely, leading, many feel, to "asylum shopping" - the circulation on the refugee grapevine of information on likely soft touches. Some of the confusion and inconsistencies in approach arise from the different procedures that apply, depending on the circumstances of the applicant.

Those applying from abroad are treated very differently to those who turn up at the frontier, and differently again to those who enter illegally before lodging an application for asylum.

The spokesman said that governments were also unhappy with the working of the Dublin Convention, which requires the member-state at which the asylum applicant first enters the EU to consider his or her application.

Because many applicants destroy their papers to prevent being sent back to their point of entry, governments have recently signed up to the Eurodac fingerprinting convention, which will allow easier identification of multiple applications.

The Commission also hopes to bring forward improvements to the Dublin Convention.

Last year, according to the UN High Commission for Refugees, Germany was the number one EU destination for asylum-seekers, with some 95,330 applications, followed by Britain with 91,000.

The Netherlands was third with 39,000 and Belgium fourth with 36,000. Ireland was 11th on 7720.

Nuala Haughey adds: A UCD study of refugee law in the other 14 EU states found that only three countries - Austria, Britain and the Netherlands - detained asylum-seekers while their cases were being processed.

In the remaining 11 states, detention was used rarely and "only on specified grounds in exceptional circumstances", the report states. "It would be clearly out of line with European standards for it [detention] to be applied during the determination procedure save in exceptional cases," it adds.

Under Irish law, the State can detain asylum-seekers on a variety of grounds, including the suspicion that they pose a threat to national security or public order.