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Barry Gilheany ✍ It is received wisdom amongst opinion makers and politicians (depending on who is in office) that immigration policies and systems especially those relating to refugees and asylums are broken. 

In 2006, the then New Labour Home Secretary, John Reid, declared that the Home Office’s Immigration and Asylum Directorate was “not fit for purpose.” As immigration has risen up the political agenda in the liberal democratic world and as debates in the US, UK and EU member states have become increasingly toxic; it is necessary, if the debates are to be detoxified, to challenge certain common and mistaken narratives; namely that there an international refugee ‘crisis’; that the most effective way of addressing the “small boats” influx into the UK from the English Channel is to smash the ‘business model’ of the “people smuggling gangs” and the deliberate conflation of people smuggling, trafficking slavery with the accompanying denial of agency of migrants or ‘clients’ of these services. It is also important not just to refute the claims of populist rabble rousers on “refugee crises” but also the tall tales told by international refugee bodies.

The belief that there is a global refugee crisis without precedent is connected to the widespread perception that increasing conflict and oppression in Latin America, the MENA region and sub-Saharan Africa are impelling increasingly larger numbers or people to flee their native lands in the direction of safe surrounds elsewhere. Three major refugee flows in the last decade have contributed majorly to this impression. The first was the arrival of about a million Syrian refugees in Europe in 2015; the massive movements of refuges from the economic collapse and the tyranny of the Nicholas Maduro regime in Venezuela along with other Central American refugees fleeing violence and poverty using Mexico as a transit country for entry into the USA and the millions of Ukrainians fleeing the full scale Russian invasion in February 2022 to neighbouring countries and then onwards to Western Europe. With such forever cycles of conflict and the seemingly desperate plight of refugee crossing borders and continents, the notion of an international refugee crisis is amplified by claims by international bodies. In 2022, UNHCR chief Filippo Grandi asserted that ‘every year of the last decade, the numbers have climbed’ and warned:

Either the international community comes together to take action to address this human tragedy, resolve conflicts and find lasting solutions, or this terrible trend will continue.[1]

The refuge crisis narrative is also sustained by the widespread but fallacious belief that more and more asylum seekers are not ‘real’ or legitimate refugees but actually economic migrants claiming to be refugees. Newspaper columns, the speeches of (mostly) conservative politicians, the populist blogosphere and the everyday comments of vox populi on X and Facebook are replete with claims that ‘bogus’ asylum seekers and ‘illegals’ are gaming the asylum system to avoid deportation.[2] Often these claims assume more lurid and sinister forms with racialised fears whipped up about young single men, invariably from Middle Eastern and/or Muslim majority origin countries and the threats thus posed to “our women”. Tapping into similar fears, agencies like UNHRC and IOM have spread the idea about “mixed” refugee flows, with more and more economic migrants mingling with ‘real’ refugees.[3]

How Refugee Processes Really Work

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) was created in 1950 to address the refugee crisis generated by the Second World War. The modern refugee deliberative system is based on the UN Refugee Convention established a year later. According to the Convention, it is a fundamental right to traverse international frontiers to seek protection from violence and persecution, so the idea of an ‘illegal asylum seeker’ is self-contradictory nonsense, a logical non sequitur. Most significantly, the Convention forbids signatories from expelling or deporting asylum seekers to third countries where they may fear persecution, without first examining the validity of their asylum application. This principle of ‘non-refoulement’ is still the cornerstone of modern refugee system to the intense annoyance of anti-immigration hawks who hanker after policies which would separate ‘real’ refugees from ‘bogus’ asylum seekers; deter ‘bogus’ asylum seekers by sending them or outsourcing their applications to transit or third countries or the creation of ‘safe havens’ for refugees in their region of origin to obviate their need to come to the West. The former UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s “dream” of accompanying ‘failed’ asylum seekers on the first flight to Rwanda; the current Labour government’s proposal to process asylum applications in an undecided Balkan country; Greece’s mass detention of refugees on a few islands like Lesbos and Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy where asylum claims would be processed are just a few examples of Western politicians’ attempts to prevent “our borders from being overrun” and “our asylum systems” from collapse.[4]

The apocalyptic scenario of the West being confronted by an unprecedented and therefore unmanageable refugee crisis rests on a triptych of widely believed falsehoods: (1) refugee numbers are at an all-time high; (2) the number of refugees are coming to the West at an almost exponential rate and (3) more and more asylum seekers are in fact economic migrants (or “bogus” asylum seekers). The facts refute each one of these three myths.[5]

First, since the 1950s, refugee numbers have been between 0.1 and 0.35 per cent of the world population, and refugees form only a small part of the international migrant population. Between 1985 and 2021, the estimated size of the total international migrant population fluctuated between 9 and 21 million; roughly between 7 and 12 per cent of the total number of international migrants in the world. Second, refugee numbers fluctuate rather than increase in the long run with fluctuations relating to levels of conflict in origin countries. Refugee numbers peaked at 16 million in the early 1990s, the era of the wars and genocides in the Balkans, Central Africa, and the Horn of Africa. Global refugee numbers slumped to nine million by the early 2000s with upticks in 2005 partly because of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and again from 2011 with the civil conflicts that grew out of the Arab Spring particularly in Libya, Yemen, and Syria. In Syria, it led to the internal displacement of 6.2 million Syrians, while 5.6 million sought sanctuary in adjacent countries. In recent years, civil war and repression in South Sudan and Eritrea; the expulsion of the Burmese Rohingya; the descent of Venezuela into a failed state and finally the full Russian invasion of Ukraine boosted refugee numbers to 26.7 million in 2022 (with the Ukraine war being the major factor that year). But as de Haas’s figures show, in 1992, 0.33 per cent of the world population were refugees, and the percentage was 0.25 in 2021. Thus, the long-term trends show that, contrary to popular belief and to first impressions, current refugee numbers are not at all-time highs.[6]

Furthermore, contrary to the popular impressions conveyed about impoverished hordes of refugees wending their way to the shores of the Wealthy West by whatever means they can, the vast majority of refugees stay in neighbouring countries. According to official UNHCR data, in 2017 about 80 per cent of refugees resided in neighbouring countries and 85 per cedent of all refugees had stayed in developing countries, percentages that have remained fairly level in recent decades. Most refugees prefer to stay in countries where they have a common affinity in terms of ethnicity, religion, and language and only a minority of refugees have the necessary resources, kin networks and paperwork to move larger distances. The most obvious example is the location of Syrian refugees. In 2018, Turkey hosted more than 3.6 million Syrian refugees, equivalent to about 4.4 per cent of its population of 82 million. In the same year, almost 1 million Syrian refugees lived in Lebanon, out of a total population of 6 million. By comparison, in that same year 532,000 Syrians were resident in Germany; 15,800 in France and 9,700 in the UK.[7]

In 2018 also, the number of refugees born in African countries stood at 6 million, African countries hosted 5.5 million refugees in the same year almost all of them from other African countries. About 92 per cent of African refugees remain in Africa, where the main refugee-hosting countries are Uganda, Ethiopia, and Kenya – which have received large groups fleeing violent conflict in South Sudan, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2021, of the 2.6 million registered Afghan refugees in the world, about 2.2 million (or 85 per cent) lived in Iran and Pakistan. Similar refugee patterns are found elsewhere: Bangladesh hosts more refugees from Myanmar, while Colombia, Peru, and Chile host most Venezuelan refugees.[8]

The third leg of the imaginary refugee tripod rests on the rise of ‘bogus’ asylum seekers. Granted that the estimates of asylum rejection and acceptance rates are the best metrics there are for the measurements of this category of refugee, notwithstanding their imperfect nature due to the variants in toughness across countries and across time. [9]

The data reveals that in most Western countries, asylum rejection rates have remained pretty stable over the past decade. For instance, in 2020 about 521,000 people applied for asylum in the EU, or 0.12 per cent of the total EU population of 448 million (excluding the UK). Of these applications, 40.7 per cent resulted in initial positive decisions. Of these 212,000 positive decisions, half were granted official refugee status. Another quarter received ‘subsidiary protection status,’ given to asylum seekers who cannot provide proof of personal persecution but who could encounter serious threat to their life and personal safety if deported. This latter category often includes people fleeing war-torn countries. Another quarter received a temporary authorisation to stay for humanitarian reasons – illness or because they were minors. Including positive outcomes of appeals procedures, a total of 281,000 asylum seekers were granted permission to stay in 2020. This constitutes 9.5 per cent of the 2,955,000 people who legally migrated to the EU from non-EU countries in the same year.[10]

Similar patterns are evident in the UK. According to data from Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, in 2019 about 388,000 overseas-born people living in the UK had originally come to the UK to seek asylum – equivalent to 4 per cent of Britain’s 9.5 million foreign-born population during that year. In 2019, there were about five asylum applications for every 10,000 people living in the UK, or about 0.05 of the total population. British refugee recognition rates are broadly in line with those of the EU. Including appeals, around 54 per cent of original asylum applications submitted between 2016 and 2018 had been awarded asylum-related protection by May 2020 – up from 36 per cent at initial decision.[11]

However, there is evidence of a recent toughening of asylum application processes in both the EU and the UK with Europe’s most senior human rights official stating that there is evidence of asylum seekers being forcibly expelled at EU borders. In testimony given in February 2025 in the European Court of Human Rights’ grand chamber in cases brought by asylum seekers against Poland and Latvia, Michael O’Flaherty, commissioner for human rights at the Council of Europe, hit out at the actions of these EU member states forcing two groups of asylum seekers back into the forested no man’s land between Belarus and EU frontiers. A group of 32 Afghan nationals claimed to have been forced back to Belarus by Polish border guards in 2021, giving them no time to claim asylum. In the second, 26 Iraqi nationals of Kurdish origin say that that they were pushed back into Belarus by Latvian authorities in the same year.[12]

The context is the surge in irregular border crossings since 2020 orchestrated by the autocratic leader of Belarus and Putin ally Alexander Lukashenko in an attempt to destabilise EU countries. While condemning Lukashenko’s “deplorable actions,” O’Flaherty cautioned that “the securitisation response by the neighbouring countries goes too far.” For him, the “modest numbers. being intercepted at the fences” does not justify the violations of international law occasioned by “the willingness to shut down any possibility of asylum “and “the willingness to return people across a border at risk of persecution.” About 17,000 people made an irregular crossing over the EU’s eastern land border, which includes Ukraine, in 2024 according to the border agency Frontex. O’Flaherty was “confident that there have been sufficient incidents” of “alleged pushbacks at the Polish border to constitute a “cause of great concern.”[13]

He also asserted that there was “compelling evidence” of “summary returns” across Greece’s land border with Turkey and from the islands after his meeting in Greece with officials to discuss the Adriana shipwreck of June 2023 when more than 700 people drowned after a boat carrying refugees from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Egypt sank in the Peloponnese; a disaster which human rights groups have attributed responsibility to the Greek authorities for their failure to mobilise “appropriate resources for a rescue” and their disregard of offers of assistance.[14]

In the UK, analysis by the Refugee Council charity has recorded a sixfold increase in the number of asylum seekers languishing in limbo while appealing against a rejected asylum application. Figures recently released by the Ministry of Justice show that at the end of 2024 there were 41,987 asylum appeals in the tribunal courts’ backlog up from 7,133 at the start of 2023. In the last three months of 2024, 12,183 appeals were lodged after the new government took steps to resume asylum decision making. Parts of the 2023 Illegal Migration Act had effectively frozen asylum applications from anyone who had arrived into the UK by an irregular route. More claims are also being refused since the last government’s introduction of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, which raised the standard of proof needed to get refugee status. According to the Refugee Council, the Home Office’s effort to clear the backlog by hiring new caseworkers and shortening initial interviews, has resulted in a rise in errors and omissions. In a rush to fulfil a pledge to clear 90,000 asylum seekers by the end of 2023, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak introduced rules to shorten the training period for staff and give them a two-hour limit for carrying out interviews with claimants.[15] More haste, less speed was certainly the consequence of such rushed policy making designed to throw red meat to Tory voters who eventually deserted the party in droves in last year’s General Election.

Michael O’ Flaherty in describing the shifting sands of European asylum and migration policy and discourse “the most challenging time for the protection of human rights” in his working life. He finds alarming the shifting of the dial on refugees and asylum by centrist politicians towards saying things that would have been beyond the pale a very short time ago. Conceding own goals to populists or “instrumentalising neighbouring states” should never be a part of democratic politics. Any external centres viz Rwanda or the Balkans must abide by fundamental red lines on human rights, including the right to claim asylum and appeal against a decision, appropriate reception conditions, no detention of children and no return to a country where the claimant risked persecution. But in political climates where “open borders experiments” and “smashing the gangs” are the currency of migration debates; is it too much to ask liberal-left opinion and activism to mobilise around Michael O’Flaherty’s red lines?

[1] Hein de Hass (2023) How Migration Really Works. A Factful Guide to the Most Divisive Issue in Politics. London: Viking p.44

[2] Ibid, p.46

[3] Ibid

[4] Ibid, pp.46-47

[5] Ibid, p.47

[6] Ibid, pp.47-49

[7] Ibid, p.49

[8] Ibid, p.50

[9] Ibid, p.51

[10] Ibid, p.51

[11] Ibid p.52

[12] Jennifer Rankin Asylum seekers are being pushed back at EU borders, says top human rights official. Guardian 4th March 2025.

[13] Ibid

[14] Ibid

[15] Rajeev Syal Sixfold rise in asylum seekers caught in appeal hearings backlog. Guardian 17th March 2025

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Refugee Myths 🪶 Smoke, Mirrors And Moral Panics

Barry Gilheany ✍ It is received wisdom amongst opinion makers and politicians (depending on who is in office) that immigration policies and systems especially those relating to refugees and asylums are broken. 

In 2006, the then New Labour Home Secretary, John Reid, declared that the Home Office’s Immigration and Asylum Directorate was “not fit for purpose.” As immigration has risen up the political agenda in the liberal democratic world and as debates in the US, UK and EU member states have become increasingly toxic; it is necessary, if the debates are to be detoxified, to challenge certain common and mistaken narratives; namely that there an international refugee ‘crisis’; that the most effective way of addressing the “small boats” influx into the UK from the English Channel is to smash the ‘business model’ of the “people smuggling gangs” and the deliberate conflation of people smuggling, trafficking slavery with the accompanying denial of agency of migrants or ‘clients’ of these services. It is also important not just to refute the claims of populist rabble rousers on “refugee crises” but also the tall tales told by international refugee bodies.

The belief that there is a global refugee crisis without precedent is connected to the widespread perception that increasing conflict and oppression in Latin America, the MENA region and sub-Saharan Africa are impelling increasingly larger numbers or people to flee their native lands in the direction of safe surrounds elsewhere. Three major refugee flows in the last decade have contributed majorly to this impression. The first was the arrival of about a million Syrian refugees in Europe in 2015; the massive movements of refuges from the economic collapse and the tyranny of the Nicholas Maduro regime in Venezuela along with other Central American refugees fleeing violence and poverty using Mexico as a transit country for entry into the USA and the millions of Ukrainians fleeing the full scale Russian invasion in February 2022 to neighbouring countries and then onwards to Western Europe. With such forever cycles of conflict and the seemingly desperate plight of refugee crossing borders and continents, the notion of an international refugee crisis is amplified by claims by international bodies. In 2022, UNHCR chief Filippo Grandi asserted that ‘every year of the last decade, the numbers have climbed’ and warned:

Either the international community comes together to take action to address this human tragedy, resolve conflicts and find lasting solutions, or this terrible trend will continue.[1]

The refuge crisis narrative is also sustained by the widespread but fallacious belief that more and more asylum seekers are not ‘real’ or legitimate refugees but actually economic migrants claiming to be refugees. Newspaper columns, the speeches of (mostly) conservative politicians, the populist blogosphere and the everyday comments of vox populi on X and Facebook are replete with claims that ‘bogus’ asylum seekers and ‘illegals’ are gaming the asylum system to avoid deportation.[2] Often these claims assume more lurid and sinister forms with racialised fears whipped up about young single men, invariably from Middle Eastern and/or Muslim majority origin countries and the threats thus posed to “our women”. Tapping into similar fears, agencies like UNHRC and IOM have spread the idea about “mixed” refugee flows, with more and more economic migrants mingling with ‘real’ refugees.[3]

How Refugee Processes Really Work

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) was created in 1950 to address the refugee crisis generated by the Second World War. The modern refugee deliberative system is based on the UN Refugee Convention established a year later. According to the Convention, it is a fundamental right to traverse international frontiers to seek protection from violence and persecution, so the idea of an ‘illegal asylum seeker’ is self-contradictory nonsense, a logical non sequitur. Most significantly, the Convention forbids signatories from expelling or deporting asylum seekers to third countries where they may fear persecution, without first examining the validity of their asylum application. This principle of ‘non-refoulement’ is still the cornerstone of modern refugee system to the intense annoyance of anti-immigration hawks who hanker after policies which would separate ‘real’ refugees from ‘bogus’ asylum seekers; deter ‘bogus’ asylum seekers by sending them or outsourcing their applications to transit or third countries or the creation of ‘safe havens’ for refugees in their region of origin to obviate their need to come to the West. The former UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s “dream” of accompanying ‘failed’ asylum seekers on the first flight to Rwanda; the current Labour government’s proposal to process asylum applications in an undecided Balkan country; Greece’s mass detention of refugees on a few islands like Lesbos and Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy where asylum claims would be processed are just a few examples of Western politicians’ attempts to prevent “our borders from being overrun” and “our asylum systems” from collapse.[4]

The apocalyptic scenario of the West being confronted by an unprecedented and therefore unmanageable refugee crisis rests on a triptych of widely believed falsehoods: (1) refugee numbers are at an all-time high; (2) the number of refugees are coming to the West at an almost exponential rate and (3) more and more asylum seekers are in fact economic migrants (or “bogus” asylum seekers). The facts refute each one of these three myths.[5]

First, since the 1950s, refugee numbers have been between 0.1 and 0.35 per cent of the world population, and refugees form only a small part of the international migrant population. Between 1985 and 2021, the estimated size of the total international migrant population fluctuated between 9 and 21 million; roughly between 7 and 12 per cent of the total number of international migrants in the world. Second, refugee numbers fluctuate rather than increase in the long run with fluctuations relating to levels of conflict in origin countries. Refugee numbers peaked at 16 million in the early 1990s, the era of the wars and genocides in the Balkans, Central Africa, and the Horn of Africa. Global refugee numbers slumped to nine million by the early 2000s with upticks in 2005 partly because of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and again from 2011 with the civil conflicts that grew out of the Arab Spring particularly in Libya, Yemen, and Syria. In Syria, it led to the internal displacement of 6.2 million Syrians, while 5.6 million sought sanctuary in adjacent countries. In recent years, civil war and repression in South Sudan and Eritrea; the expulsion of the Burmese Rohingya; the descent of Venezuela into a failed state and finally the full Russian invasion of Ukraine boosted refugee numbers to 26.7 million in 2022 (with the Ukraine war being the major factor that year). But as de Haas’s figures show, in 1992, 0.33 per cent of the world population were refugees, and the percentage was 0.25 in 2021. Thus, the long-term trends show that, contrary to popular belief and to first impressions, current refugee numbers are not at all-time highs.[6]

Furthermore, contrary to the popular impressions conveyed about impoverished hordes of refugees wending their way to the shores of the Wealthy West by whatever means they can, the vast majority of refugees stay in neighbouring countries. According to official UNHCR data, in 2017 about 80 per cent of refugees resided in neighbouring countries and 85 per cedent of all refugees had stayed in developing countries, percentages that have remained fairly level in recent decades. Most refugees prefer to stay in countries where they have a common affinity in terms of ethnicity, religion, and language and only a minority of refugees have the necessary resources, kin networks and paperwork to move larger distances. The most obvious example is the location of Syrian refugees. In 2018, Turkey hosted more than 3.6 million Syrian refugees, equivalent to about 4.4 per cent of its population of 82 million. In the same year, almost 1 million Syrian refugees lived in Lebanon, out of a total population of 6 million. By comparison, in that same year 532,000 Syrians were resident in Germany; 15,800 in France and 9,700 in the UK.[7]

In 2018 also, the number of refugees born in African countries stood at 6 million, African countries hosted 5.5 million refugees in the same year almost all of them from other African countries. About 92 per cent of African refugees remain in Africa, where the main refugee-hosting countries are Uganda, Ethiopia, and Kenya – which have received large groups fleeing violent conflict in South Sudan, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2021, of the 2.6 million registered Afghan refugees in the world, about 2.2 million (or 85 per cent) lived in Iran and Pakistan. Similar refugee patterns are found elsewhere: Bangladesh hosts more refugees from Myanmar, while Colombia, Peru, and Chile host most Venezuelan refugees.[8]

The third leg of the imaginary refugee tripod rests on the rise of ‘bogus’ asylum seekers. Granted that the estimates of asylum rejection and acceptance rates are the best metrics there are for the measurements of this category of refugee, notwithstanding their imperfect nature due to the variants in toughness across countries and across time. [9]

The data reveals that in most Western countries, asylum rejection rates have remained pretty stable over the past decade. For instance, in 2020 about 521,000 people applied for asylum in the EU, or 0.12 per cent of the total EU population of 448 million (excluding the UK). Of these applications, 40.7 per cent resulted in initial positive decisions. Of these 212,000 positive decisions, half were granted official refugee status. Another quarter received ‘subsidiary protection status,’ given to asylum seekers who cannot provide proof of personal persecution but who could encounter serious threat to their life and personal safety if deported. This latter category often includes people fleeing war-torn countries. Another quarter received a temporary authorisation to stay for humanitarian reasons – illness or because they were minors. Including positive outcomes of appeals procedures, a total of 281,000 asylum seekers were granted permission to stay in 2020. This constitutes 9.5 per cent of the 2,955,000 people who legally migrated to the EU from non-EU countries in the same year.[10]

Similar patterns are evident in the UK. According to data from Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, in 2019 about 388,000 overseas-born people living in the UK had originally come to the UK to seek asylum – equivalent to 4 per cent of Britain’s 9.5 million foreign-born population during that year. In 2019, there were about five asylum applications for every 10,000 people living in the UK, or about 0.05 of the total population. British refugee recognition rates are broadly in line with those of the EU. Including appeals, around 54 per cent of original asylum applications submitted between 2016 and 2018 had been awarded asylum-related protection by May 2020 – up from 36 per cent at initial decision.[11]

However, there is evidence of a recent toughening of asylum application processes in both the EU and the UK with Europe’s most senior human rights official stating that there is evidence of asylum seekers being forcibly expelled at EU borders. In testimony given in February 2025 in the European Court of Human Rights’ grand chamber in cases brought by asylum seekers against Poland and Latvia, Michael O’Flaherty, commissioner for human rights at the Council of Europe, hit out at the actions of these EU member states forcing two groups of asylum seekers back into the forested no man’s land between Belarus and EU frontiers. A group of 32 Afghan nationals claimed to have been forced back to Belarus by Polish border guards in 2021, giving them no time to claim asylum. In the second, 26 Iraqi nationals of Kurdish origin say that that they were pushed back into Belarus by Latvian authorities in the same year.[12]

The context is the surge in irregular border crossings since 2020 orchestrated by the autocratic leader of Belarus and Putin ally Alexander Lukashenko in an attempt to destabilise EU countries. While condemning Lukashenko’s “deplorable actions,” O’Flaherty cautioned that “the securitisation response by the neighbouring countries goes too far.” For him, the “modest numbers. being intercepted at the fences” does not justify the violations of international law occasioned by “the willingness to shut down any possibility of asylum “and “the willingness to return people across a border at risk of persecution.” About 17,000 people made an irregular crossing over the EU’s eastern land border, which includes Ukraine, in 2024 according to the border agency Frontex. O’Flaherty was “confident that there have been sufficient incidents” of “alleged pushbacks at the Polish border to constitute a “cause of great concern.”[13]

He also asserted that there was “compelling evidence” of “summary returns” across Greece’s land border with Turkey and from the islands after his meeting in Greece with officials to discuss the Adriana shipwreck of June 2023 when more than 700 people drowned after a boat carrying refugees from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Egypt sank in the Peloponnese; a disaster which human rights groups have attributed responsibility to the Greek authorities for their failure to mobilise “appropriate resources for a rescue” and their disregard of offers of assistance.[14]

In the UK, analysis by the Refugee Council charity has recorded a sixfold increase in the number of asylum seekers languishing in limbo while appealing against a rejected asylum application. Figures recently released by the Ministry of Justice show that at the end of 2024 there were 41,987 asylum appeals in the tribunal courts’ backlog up from 7,133 at the start of 2023. In the last three months of 2024, 12,183 appeals were lodged after the new government took steps to resume asylum decision making. Parts of the 2023 Illegal Migration Act had effectively frozen asylum applications from anyone who had arrived into the UK by an irregular route. More claims are also being refused since the last government’s introduction of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, which raised the standard of proof needed to get refugee status. According to the Refugee Council, the Home Office’s effort to clear the backlog by hiring new caseworkers and shortening initial interviews, has resulted in a rise in errors and omissions. In a rush to fulfil a pledge to clear 90,000 asylum seekers by the end of 2023, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak introduced rules to shorten the training period for staff and give them a two-hour limit for carrying out interviews with claimants.[15] More haste, less speed was certainly the consequence of such rushed policy making designed to throw red meat to Tory voters who eventually deserted the party in droves in last year’s General Election.

Michael O’ Flaherty in describing the shifting sands of European asylum and migration policy and discourse “the most challenging time for the protection of human rights” in his working life. He finds alarming the shifting of the dial on refugees and asylum by centrist politicians towards saying things that would have been beyond the pale a very short time ago. Conceding own goals to populists or “instrumentalising neighbouring states” should never be a part of democratic politics. Any external centres viz Rwanda or the Balkans must abide by fundamental red lines on human rights, including the right to claim asylum and appeal against a decision, appropriate reception conditions, no detention of children and no return to a country where the claimant risked persecution. But in political climates where “open borders experiments” and “smashing the gangs” are the currency of migration debates; is it too much to ask liberal-left opinion and activism to mobilise around Michael O’Flaherty’s red lines?

[1] Hein de Hass (2023) How Migration Really Works. A Factful Guide to the Most Divisive Issue in Politics. London: Viking p.44

[2] Ibid, p.46

[3] Ibid

[4] Ibid, pp.46-47

[5] Ibid, p.47

[6] Ibid, pp.47-49

[7] Ibid, p.49

[8] Ibid, p.50

[9] Ibid, p.51

[10] Ibid, p.51

[11] Ibid p.52

[12] Jennifer Rankin Asylum seekers are being pushed back at EU borders, says top human rights official. Guardian 4th March 2025.

[13] Ibid

[14] Ibid

[15] Rajeev Syal Sixfold rise in asylum seekers caught in appeal hearings backlog. Guardian 17th March 2025

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Barry Gilheany immigration

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