An examination of the emergence of the legal regime in the United Kingdom addressing refugees and asylum seekers.

The National Asylum Support Service provides accommodation for asylum seekers who are destitute, or likely to become destitute. There work is demand led and the increase in asylum applications between 2001 and 2003 caused considerable problems. Although the system coped with the pressure, a subsequent ministerial review concluded that the system needed to be improved. This report looks at the Service to see if lessons have been learnt and its approach has been modified to provide a better quality service at a more economical cost.

Community asylum law is becoming ever more essential to asylum law in Europe. But many intricate questions about this new body of law remain to be resolved. Do the Community rules weaken or improve the position of asylum seekers? Would a future Community asylum law have to observe international norms? What role should the Court of Justice play in asylum matters? And does the communautarisation of asylum law affect the possibilities of asylum seekers to approach domestic courts, or the European Court of Human Rights? These and other questions are addressed in this book. It offers, besides an in-depth study of the relation between European and international asylum law, a practical manual for European asylum law. It discusses the content and meaning of all Community regulations and directives on asylum, as well as their possible use (and reliability) in domestic proceedings.

Unaccompanied and separated children continue to be caught up in programs to deflect unauthorised Australian boat arrivals to offshore processing centres. If such children do make it to Australia, the processes for identifying children travelling alone are inadequate, with too much reliance placed on the self-identification of such children. No child victim of trafficking has been identified in Australia since 1994. Australia's refugee status determination system was established with adult asylum seekers as the norm. Children face obvious disadvantage in both articulating their story and in being heard. At the crucial first point of contact with authorities children are required to articulate their need for protection without either an advisor or an effective guardian. Case studies of children within the asylum process also suggest that immigration officials and officials at appellate level have been poorly trained and have lacked the skills to deal with child asylum seekers with appropriate sensitivity. Another barrier faced by these children is legal: questions remain as to how well the international definition of refugee has been read to accommodate the particular experiences of children. It is hoped that this report will encourage Australian officials to think seriously about children as refugees in their own right - most particularly when the children are travelling alone.This Report was funded by the MacArthur Foundation (Chicago), the Australian Research Council and the Myer Foundation.Also available Seeking Asylum Alone - A Comparative Study- Unaccompanied and Separated Children and Refugee Protection in Australia, the UK and the US, by Jacqueline Bhabha and Mary Crock.

treatment of asylum Seekers : Tenth report of session 2006-07, Vol. 2: Oral and written Evidence

This book establishes asylum seekers as a socially excluded group. It provides an overview of historic and contemporary dispersal systems, and it investigates the policy of dispersing asylum seekers across the UK and how this dispersal impacts their lives. It argues that deterrent asylum policies increase the sense of liminality experienced by individuals. The book challenges assumptions that asylum seekers should be socially excluded until they receive refugee status, and it illustrates how asylum seekers create their own sense of 'belonging' in the absence of official recognition.

Pirouet, a Briton who has taught at universities in Uganda and Kenya, surveys UK immigration policy between 1987 and 1999 and finds that xenophobia frequently has won out, in spite of political rhetoric in praise of giving shelter to those fleeing persecution. "The legislation passed in the last decade has made it progressively more difficult for anyone seeking asylum in the UK and life progressively more uncertain and uncomfortable for those who, against all odds, manage to reach this country," she writes. "A mixed message is coming from government....Britain is now irreversibly a multicultural nation, and the only healthy kind of self-definition must take that into account." c. Book News Inc.