The Minister for Justice has undertaken to examine how a proposed law to fine carriers of undocumented migrants could be improved in the light of concerns highlighted yesterday by refugee lobby groups.
The plans for fines of €3,000 for each illegal migrant brought to Ireland by airlines, hauliers and ferry companies were contained in a Bill which lapsed when the last Dáil was dissolved.
To mark World Refugee Day yesterday, seven lobby groups, as well as Irish hauliers, combined to endorse a call by the Green Party MEP, Ms Patricia McKenna, for the Immigration Bill 2001 to be scrapped.
The groups, including Amnesty and the Irish Refugee Council, claimed that the law as currently proposed would drive desperate refugees into the hands of traffickers and force untrained transport staff to make life-and-death decisions about who is allowed to travel to Ireland.
They said that such measures, which are in place in other EU states, would deprive people fleeing persecution of the right to enter Ireland to make a claim for protection as refugees under the Geneva Convention of 1951. Many asylum-seekers travel on false documents and this does not invalidate their right to seek to be recognised as refugees once they arrive in a host country.
Responding to the call yesterday for the Bill to be dropped, Mr McDowell told The Irish Times that he wanted to "look carefully" at the proposals which had been before the previous government to see how they could be improved.
"I take the point that if you make it absolutely impossible for somebody to physically get here, it's very difficult to see in that context whether you are fully living up to your obligations under the 1951 convention, and therefore there may have to be modifications of Ireland's practices to make it possible for people who are genuine applicants for refugee status to apply for that status to the Irish Government without physically presenting themselves in Ireland."
Ireland could accept "programme" refugees on a structured basis through the United Nations, he added.
Mr McDowell made his comments after launching an exhibition of art by refugees and torture survivors organised by the Centre for the Care of Torture Survivors in Dublin. The "Art of Living" exhibition will travel to Cork and Limerick this month.
Mr McDowell said that torture survivors were "a very real testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the indomitable will of man, and woman, to overcome unimaginable traumas and rebuild shattered lives".
At a separate press conference, the Green Party's justice spokeswoman, Ms McKenna, said that sanctions on carriers were an inappropriate and dangerous way of dealing with illegal immigration "because no distinction is made between asylum-seekers, who must flee their country using illegal means, and illegal migrants".
British Airways had stated that, since 1987, when such sanctions were introduced in the UK, at least 400 passengers who had invalid travel documents but went undetected had subsequently been granted refugee status. "If these passengers had been identified as 'illegal cargo', they would have been refused entry to the UK and deported back to where they came from," Ms McKenna said.
An Iraqi refugee who paid $18,000 to traffickers who brought his family to Dublin by air explained how his journey would have been impossible without the use of forged documents. The man, identified as Mohammed, fled Saddam Hussein's dictatorial regime, under which his soldier brother had been forced to drink benzine before being shot in the stomach after disobeying an order to use a chemical bomb.
"I find safety here," he said. "I find the new life for me, because any children born in Iraq have lost their freedom from the moment they are born."
Mr Jimmy Quinn, from the Irish Road Hauliers' Association, said that refugees were "posted like letters" into soft-sided trucks by traffickers who slashed the roofs of the trucks. Hauliers were being driven out of business by such sanctions across Europe, he added.