UK: Effective amnesty for 147,000 asylum seekers

LONDON: According to a British newspaper about 147,000 asylum seekers have been granted an “effective amnesty” to stay in Britain by bungling border staff.

The UK Border Agency parked a backlog of cases in a secretive archive after minimal checks, a report by Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration John Vine reveals today, reported Mirror.

The report also said that the officials did nothing to check where the asylum seekers were - and whether or not they were a risk.

It means many of those “who would otherwise have faced removal will have accrued rights to remain in the UK”, independent Mr Vine told the media.

Ministers had ordered the UKBA in 2006 to “deal with” the cases by summer 2011 and a body was set up to “conclude” them.

The agency told MPs last year it had cleared the backlog but in today’s report Mr Vine said 147,000 cases in fact “remained unresolved”.

He said: “I found that updates given by the Agency to Parliament in the summer of 2011, stating that the legacy of unresolved asylum cases was resolved, were inaccurate.

“In fact, the programme of legacy work is far from resolved.

“On the evidence I found, it is hard not to reach the conclusion that cases were placed in the archive after only very minimal work in order to fulfil the pledge to conclude this work by the summer of 2011.”

Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee Keith Vaz said the report meant there had been an “effective amnesty” on asylum seekers.

“This is a devastating report into the way in which the UKBA administrates the immigration system”, he said.

“The failure to properly check asylum cases means UKBA is in danger of overseeing an effective amnesty for many of them.

The UK Border Agency had 302,064 cases to investigate, trace or “conclude”.