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Asylum trends and issues

A combination of widespread violence, deteriorating humanitarian situations and human rights abuses around the world has led to increasing number of people being forced to seek asylum across international borders.

Last month, the UN Refugees Agency, the UNHCR, released its Asylum Trends Report for 2014. While the UNHCR report focuses only on levels and trends of people seeking asylum in 44 industrialised countries, the statistics it contains do indicate that the phenomenon of people seeking asylum abroad has grown substantially during the past year. A total of 866,000 asylum claims were made during 2014 in the 38 European and six non-European countries, including Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Korea, and the US. Besides the spike in asylum seekers in 1992, due to the Balkans crisis, asylum applications received in 2014 is the highest number on record since the early 1980s, when such statistics started being collected by the UNHCR in a systematic way.

The number of Pakistani asylum seekers in the above-mentioned countries has increased over the past four years. There were over 26,000 applications submitted by asylum seekers from Pakistan in 2014, a much higher number than the annual average of about 11,000 claims back in 2009 and 2010.

The recent spike in asylum applicants from Pakistan has made it the sixth- highest source country of asylum seekers in the industrialised world in 2014. In Australia, close to 9,000 claims were registered in 2014, and a third of these applicants were either from China, India or Pakistan.

While the above report focuses on cases of asylum seekers in 44 industrialised countries, the problem of people fleeing across borders to seek refuge in other countries is not confined to industrialised countries alone.

Although Syrian applicants comprised the largest group of asylum seekers in industrialised countries in 2014, their number is modest compared with the number of Syrian refugees hosted by its neighbouring countries. The number of registered or awaiting registration refugees in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey has now surpassed the 3.9 million mark. Similarly, resource-constrained countries like Pakistan and Iran have had to contend with a similarly large number of Afghan refugees, over the past three decades. Yet, there is no effort made to determine how many Syrian or Afghan refugees, who have fled into neighbouring countries due to the threat of violent persecution, can be categorised as asylum seekers. Similar movements of people across international borders within Africa is not mentioned either. Surely, the UNHCR’s extensive databases on refugee flows across the developing world could be used to provide a fuller picture of those in need of asylum, even if they haven’t been able to reach the industrialised world in order to apply for it.

Thus, while the UNHCR report provides a useful collation of asylum-seeker trends within a small number of industrialised countries, the information needed to address the challenge requires a more comprehensive approach. Moreover, the statistics provided for asylum seekers in the UNHCR report only indicates the number of individuals who have applied for asylum. It does not provide information about how many of these asylum seekers claims have been recognised and actually granted asylum. There is no information available in the UNHCR asylum trends report about who the asylum seekers are, or about their stated reasons for seeking asylum status. There is no mention of the treatment being provided to asylum seekers by different countries while their claims are being processed. The report, for instance, notices that asylum claims have decreased in Australia during the past year, but it fails to mention the controversial policies adopted by the Australian government to prevent boats full of asylum seekers from reaching its shores.

The UNHCR would be well served if it began addressing the above concerns in order to provide a more accurate and nuanced view of asylum seeker trends, and how their needs are being met by host countries.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 17th,  2015.

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The post Asylum trends and issues appeared first on The Express Tribune.


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