Land of tolerance
COLUMN
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By Keijo Himanen
A common refugee and asylum policy for the European Union remains a remote dream. The target is for the year 2010. Nevertheless, the member states are constantly making national decisions which make the position of asylum seekers more difficult. This can be one reason why significantly fewer asylum-seekers seem to be arriving in Europe this year. The only countries where the numbers are growing are France, and somewhat surprisingly, Finland.
In some countries, the numbers of people seeking asylum have effectively collapsed. In Denmark 12,500 applications for asylum were made in 2001, but last year there were only 4,500. The figures also reflect a significantly tighter policy on asylum.. Rules have become more restrictive in Norway and Sweden as well, and the number of applications has declined, especially this year.
Figures for Finland reveal that by early November 2,885 applications for asylum were left at the Directorate of Immigration, which is a few hundred more than at the same time last year.
Finland is a notoriously difficult country for asylum. This year only 28 applications were approved. However, those numbers are not the whole truth; in 712 cases, residence permits, which in practice provide full protection and social benefits, were granted.
Finland has thus always taken a relatively understanding attitude toward asylum seekers, but our reputation as a tolerant country has grown, at least from the Nordic perspective. As legislation becomes tougher elsewhere, Finland’s law on aliens has remained the same for years, at least with respect to asylum seekers. The new law on aliens, which came into effect in May last year, left asylum procedure largely unchanged.
Compared with many other countries, Finland’s advantage from an applicant’s point of view is the high level of protection under the law. It is possible to appeal decisions to the Administrative Court, and from there, to the Supreme Administrative Court. The procedure guarantees the applicants a stay of months, or even years, in Finland.
Even those with no apparent foundation for their asylum claim can appeal, but it will not prevent them from being turned away.
The Directorate of Immigration has managed to shorten its processing times. Before the new law came into effect, it cleared away all old asylum applications. It is hard for an outsider to understand where that new energy came from. However, administrators at the Directorate insist that each application was handled as thoroughly as before. Evenings and weekends were used, and the job was done. Now the average processing time is 1 - 4 months.
Applicants shuttling from one country to another have long been a problem for the EU countries. Tens of thousands of people with their applications take up the energy of the various immigration authorities. Under the Dublin Convention they are returned to the country where they first submitted their asylum application.
In Finland there have been more than 1,000 decisions based on the terms of the Dublin Convention, which is slightly under half of all negative decisions. The greatest number of wanderers come from Germany, Norway, and Sweden. Some of them have applied for asylum in the EU area as many as four or five times. Apparently they want to try their luck once again in Finland.
Likewise, Finland has to receive applicants who have left this country, some of whom are sent back here for a third time.
Handling Dublin Convention cases usually takes two to three months, although many are processed more quickly. There are even cases in which an applicant has been sent back in less than a week.
It is not always easy to ascertain which country has responsibility for the handling of a particular asylum case. The Eurodac fingerprint registry, which was taken into use in January last year, is gradually getting to be so extensive that it is easier than before to identify an applicant as a wanderer.
Wanderers have been a real burden for the Directorate of Migration. Before the development of information technology, officials used ordinary mail to stay in touch with each other. Fingerprints were posted to the suspected countries of origin, where investigations might take several weeks. After that, the procedure continued in the country where the application was made, and it would often take months before a matter was cleared up.
Eurodac has proven to be a real success-story. The fingerprint database is constantly expanding. Now the register has half a million people in it. Officials can see more quickly than before on a computer what kind of an applicant is in question. Alongside Eurodac there is another system - Dublin-net - which was launched a year ago. It is a protected network, through which officials are able to deal with each other very quickly. For instance, requests for taking back wandering asylum seekers can be sent off immediately, and the answer comes right away. It is possible to agree on matters that used to take weeks, and even months.
Rapid asylum processing guarantees that applicants who do not meet the requirements of asylum do not stay in the country. In the 1990, only a few asylum-seekers whose applications had been rejected were actually sent out of Finland, even though they constituted an overwhelming majority of applicants. The reason was the slowness of the process, during which time the applicants became rooted in Finland, and they were granted residence permits on that basis.
Things are different now. The Directorate of Immigration seeks to make its decisions more quickly than before. Nevertheless, there are still gaps in the chain. The slowness of the process in the Administrative Court and in the implementation of decisions by police cause further delays. There are constantly 200 - 300 asylum seekers who have received a negative decision awaiting deportation. Each one of them costs about EUR 40 a day, which means that the wait is expensive for society.
The lack of common legislation governing the process of applying for asylum is one of the greatest challenges facing the EU. Many of the problems of illegal immigration will be solved the moment that the EU manages to pass an unambiguous and clear law that all member states can interpret in the same way.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 9.12.2004
KEIJO HIMANEN / Helsingin Sanomat
keijo.himanen@hs.fi
