News Brief

Churches attack Blair over immigration

-25/5/04

Churches have criticised the Prime Minister's rhetoric on immigration, and the claim that immigrants will only be accepted when it is in Britain's interest to do so.

The comments came at a conference this weekend organised by the Churches' Commission for Racial Justice.

The conference called 'Let justice roll down: asylum seekers and the Churches' brought together 150 people. In a statement the conference welcomed the Prime Minister's promise of a 'top-to-bottom analysis' of the immigration system and how it can be improved. It also affirmed Tony Blair in his recognition that, far from being 'swamped' by immigrants, the UK has fewer foreign-born workers than other major European countries and that the UK was in urgent need of more to sustain the economy and to perform essential tasks in society.

However, the statement expressed regret over the Prime Minister's stated policy that immigrants would only be accepted when it was "in our country's interests".

The statement from the conference said; "The great majority of those who seek entry to this country will certainly, if allowed to stay, be of value to the economy and to British society in general, and if this is true also of those who come here seeking asylum. But it was the plight of refugees themselves, not the national interests of the receiving countries, that inspired the drafting of the 1951 UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol, to which the UK is signatory.

"Our government has a moral as well as a legal duty to offer assistance and security to those fleeing persecution in their own countries. A system which gives preference to national interests over the basic rights and freedoms of innocent victims of oppression, torture and persecution is unworthy of the British people and an affront to the values we profess."

The conference urged the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary to re-examine the present system and work for a harmonisation of the European Union asylum policies, bringing them up to humane best practice, in the light of "the over-riding duty to welcome all those who have a well-founded fear of persecution in their home countries." It also urged that immigration procedures were both just and efficient, and called for an immediate end to detention without charge, denial of means of subsistence, internment of children and young people, and "all other consequences of the present regulations which demean, impoverish and seriously affect the health of many thousand asylum seekers in this country."