UK 'could take 200,000 a year'

Jason Burke, chief reporter, Saturday September 01 2001, The Guardian

The head of the influential United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has suggested that Britain could accept up to 200,000 refugees each year under a radical new scheme designed to solve the current refugee crisis.

In meetings with specialists in Britain earlier this year Ruud Lubbers, the former Dutch Prime Minister who heads the UNHCR, said that he favours a quota system under which individual states - or groups of states such as the EU - would agree to resettle a set number of refugees.

He suggested that the UK might be able to accept up to 200,000 refugees annually - eight times the number accepted for settlement last year. Lubbers made the comments during a wide-ranging 'brainstorming' discussion of solutions to the problems of refugees, people smuggling and economic migration.

Pro-refugee campaigners welcomed the high figure but attacked the idea of quotas.

Sources close to Lubbers suggested that one idea was that refugees would be screened by the UNHCR as close to their homes as possible. If they qualified for asylum they would then be dispersed around the world. That would enable individual governments to slim down inefficient and expensive asylum claim processing systems. Despite the controversy, the Government has already expressed support for some elements of the plan.

After meeting Lubbers in London last February Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, called for each member of the European Union to agree annual quotas of asylum-seekers allowed to stay in their countries. A Home Office spokesman confirmed that an EU-wide resettlement plan had been discussed with the UNHCR. A UNHCR spokesman said: 'We have not heard of any figure but that does not mean that Lubbers has not said it. It would obviously be difficult selling 200,000 to a British audience.'

Last year the UK received the largest number of asylum applications in the EU (97,700 out of a total of 390,000) followed by Germany (78,800). But, according to the UNHCR, Britain takes fewer refugees per head of population than Belgium and the Netherlands. Studies have found that the EU needs 1.4 million new immigrants a year to compensate for rapidly ageing populations.

'In practical terms it would be wonderful to be able to have 200,000 refugees allowed to settle here,' said Vaughan Jones, director of Praxis, a charity which provides advice for refugees. 'But there are serious concerns about quotas. What happens to those fleeing persecution once the quotas are full?'

Gerald Howarth, Conservative MP for Aldershot, said Lubbers's ideas would create far more problems than it solved. 'We are a tiny island. The logistics just don't stack up,' he said. 'It is utterly unrealistic and just sends the message to the people who trade in human misery that our doors are open. The UNHCR is doing tyrants' ethnic cleansing for them.'

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited: http://www.observer.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,545648,00.html