The late Sir Peter Ustinov, an accomplished political iconoclast, was also President of the World Federalist Movement, which seeks better global governance. He described federalism as the only political system that enables us ‘to enjoy the differences between us’ and bemoaned the fact that it had become the ‘F’ word in British politics.
Yet it is a system that works from the bottom up, not top down – starting at what can be done at the local level – and constitutionally reserves power upwards to higher institutions only when issues cannot be dealt with properly at the lower level.
That is the importance of the European Union, the need for a proper constitution and its relevance to asylum. When, in the latest opinion polls, four-fifths of the population think that the government has lost control of asylum, the need for a co-ordinated European approach becomes even more pressing – it is beyond the scope of national governments.
The alarmist figures, popular prejudice and tabloid hysteria (recently demonstrated by fears of massive migration from the accession states that then never materialised) together with a paucity of reliable statistics lead to a sterile national debate.
Movement of asylum seekers has been generated by many factors which the West has been unable or unwilling to prevent, such as the genocide, gross abuses of human rights and internal strife in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Rwanda, Somalia, Sri Lanka and former Yugoslavia (there are many others) over the last decade.
Increased facility for travel and knowledge of other parts of the world have also contributed.
The British public believes we take twenty percent of the world’s refugees: it is no more than two percent. The figures are met with apoplexy, yet the greatest number ever in one year – 100,000 including dependents – is more than manageable by the fourth largest economy in the world (only if done efficiently by the Home Office – asylum has got out of control politically rather than practically).
The dubious concepts of offshore processing centres, sending people to countries with which they have no connection and denying justice only highlights political desperation.
All this points to the need for a common European response.
Immigration policy hitherto has remained one of the few exercises of national sovereignty unconditioned by external factors. This is unsurprising: justice and home affairs matters were the last to be brought within European Union institutional competence. Under the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, asylum policy became a ‘matter of common interest’ at the intergovernmental level (‘third pillar’), when previously there had been only mechanisms for co-operation. By the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1999, it moved to the ‘first pillar’. Article 63 of the treaty requires the council of ministers to adopt minimum standards – not common measures – in four areas by 1 May 2004.
So far, progress has not been auspicious.
Left to their own devices, the countries in Europe have sought to leap-frog each other in lowering standards towards asylum seekers, in the (mistaken) belief that this acts as a deterrent and will not identify them among neighbouring states as being a ‘soft-touch’ and a ‘pull’. Sadly, the UK has been in the fore.
The most recent report of the House of Lords European Union Committee complained of minimum standards ‘reflecting the lowest common denominator among member states’ leading to the further lowering of standards in states where these are higher than the minimum. It called for a European documentation centre on country information but rejected the idea of a central EU authority to decide on claims.
With enlargement, the asylum frontier moves closer to the Urals.
The requirements are clear: the European Union needs a co-ordinated approach of common, optimum measures based on humanity and human rights for those fleeing persecution above despicable minimum standards. Britain should take the lead and the moral high ground. As the world’s greatest economic power, the EU is ideally placed to do that if it has the political will.