A temporary pause placed on making final decisions on requests for asylum from people who fled to the State from Syria will be reviewed in the coming weeks, Minister for Justice Helen McEntee has said.
The assessment of fewer than 400 applications from Syrians are impacted by the move, with final rulings on their asylum claims now on hold.
“This is not a long-term pause as far as I’m concerned, but we do need to see how things transpire in the weeks ahead,” Ms McEntee said.
The Department of Justice this week paused decisions on asylum cases involving people from Syria following the collapse of the autocratic regime of Bashar al-Assad after a 13-year-long civil war. The fall of the brutal regime took international leaders by surprise, with Syrian opposition forces, led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, quickly advancing across the country and seizing the capital of Damascus in recent days.
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“I really welcome the end of the Assad regime,” Ms McEntee said. “This is a regime that worked with fear and violence and control and I think the Syrian people now have an opportunity to set their own future and their own pathway.”
The Minister said decisions on whether to grant asylum or refugee status had to take into account the current situation in an applicant’s country of origin.
“What I’ve done simply is pause any decision-making on the basis that it is uncertain as to what the situation may be in the weeks ahead. Any decision has to be made based on what is happening in that country of origin at that time,” she said.
Ms McEntee was speaking on her way into a meeting of EU justice ministers in Brussels, at which matters including the future of Syrian refugees and asylum seekers are to be discussed.
More than one million Syrians fleeing the civil war and Assad regime came to Europe over the last decade. A number of EU states, such as France, Germany, Belgium and Italy, have also paused decisions in pending asylum cases for Syrians.
The Austrian government, known for its hardline approach to migration, has in recent days raised the prospect of organising a programme of “orderly repatriation and deportation” to send asylum seekers back to Syria.
Ms McEntee said Ireland was not considering any similar scheme. “It’s important that we do work together and that we work, where possible, in step on this issue,” she said. “I think it’s really positive that the Assad regime has come to an end. At the same time I think we can all see that it’s not clear what will happen next.”
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