I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."
The Bill before us contains a number of important developments of Ireland's immigration law and the law regarding asylum seekers. Its provisions build on the solid achievements of the previous Government in the areas of immigration and asylum policy. The Government is committed to the ongoing development of immigration policy within the balanced and realistic co-ordinates set down in our programme for Government in the interests of Irish society in all its diversity and with fairness to all who seek to come to Ireland to share in and contribute to that society.
That migration issues are now to the forefront of public policy-making, something unheard of little more than a decade ago, is in many ways a welcome and necessary consequence of the economic and social successes of the State in the last decade. We have turned around from being a country traditionally of outward migration to one to which people are keen to come to share in and contribute to our prosperity.
Central Statistics Office figures indicate an estimated average net inward migration of more than 20,000 people a year, mainly returning Irish migrants and people from within the European Economic Area, who are coming to Ireland to make their living. However, Ireland's attractions as a place for people's futures are recognised further afield as well. Employment permits issued by the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment in the four years from 1999 to this year indicate something of the order of 100,000 non-EEA nationals migrating to Ireland for economic reasons, observing our normal immigration requirements and being made welcome in their places of employment and their new communities. In 2002, some 93,000 non-EEA nationals either registered or renewed their registration with the Garda national immigration bureau. These figures are clear evidence of a thriving and effective immigration system in Ireland, capable of facilitating non-nationals who wish to come to work and live in the State in compliance with our laws.
No claim is made that our immigration systems represent the pinnacle of perfection. The programme for Government acknowledges as much. We are committed to bringing forward a comprehensive code of immigration and residence legislation, which will undoubtedly provide a better framework for the development and implementation of evolving immigration policies. Considerable groundwork has been laid for this major project, including a public consultation process and the excellent report commissioned by the Minister's predecessor from the International Organisation for Migration, which sets out how the challenges facing Ireland in the area of migration policy and practice are dealt with in other countries around the world.
While that legislation is under consideration, the Government continues to evolve the immigration policies designed to facilitate economic migration into the State so as to keep them in tune with the changing economic climate and other influencing factors. The growing number of exotic accents that we hear in the streets and encounter in our daily lives are for the most part the voices of non-nationals who have properly and honestly availed themselves of those immigration policies to migrate to Ireland. These are people who are wanted and are welcome here.
With the increase in regular migration, we have experienced what many other developed countries of the western world had already undergone in the previous decade or so: a growth in illegal migration and in the international business of facilitating those who for one reason or other feel that they cannot, or are otherwise disinclined to, avail of the regular means provided by law for entering and settling in their chosen countries of destination. These people-smugglers, who are in business for the profits they can garner and whose interest in the lives of their clients goes no further than the extent to which they can pay, run operations that can often be highly sophisticated, with advanced document-forging skills and the ability to switch from one method or route to another as immigration authorities succeed in blocking off loopholes. One feature common to illegal people-smuggling throughout the world is the universal abuse of asylum processes as a means of securing a toehold in the country of destination. Ireland is no exception when it comes to this abuse.
I should restate at this point the well-established Government policy in the matter of asylum – a policy to which the Government is unshakeably committed. The aim of this policy is to ensure that people arriving in the State who are genuinely in need of the protection of the State are identified as such as soon as possible after they arrive so that they can immediately start the process of integration into Irish society and take up the rights to which they are entitled under the 1951 Geneva Convention relating to the status of refugees and its amending protocol of 1967.
A person who seeks asylum in the State makes the very serious claim to be here in our country seeking the protection of our State and cannot return to his or her country of origin for fear of being persecuted. Any reasonable person will accept that for a person who claims to be persecuted nothing in his or her life at that time can be more important than obtaining a decision on that claim at the earliest possible moment. In return all that is asked of the applicant is his or her full co-operation in a process whereby the investigator and the applicant work together to determine whether the person is a refugee. An asylum applicant in Ireland can be assured of a system that is fair, transparent and independent and that provides him or her with the opportunity to avail of legal representation and interpretation at every step of the way. This is a system fully in line with our obligations under the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and the 1967 amending protocol.
In furtherance of this commitment, we have a legal framework for honouring our international commitments to those who are oppressed and persecuted, and who are in need of the protection of this State. That framework is the Refugee Act 1996, under which the claims of people who seek protection here are investigated independently by the Refugee Applications Commissioner, and negative recommendations emerging from that independent process can be appealed to another independent body, the Refugee Appeals Tribunal. Legal assistance is made available, at the expense of the State through the Refugee Legal Service of the Legal Aid Board, at each stage of this process, and each step is liable to court scrutiny by means of judicial review.
Interpreter facilities are available as necessary at every stage. Overseen by the Reception and Integration Agency established for the purpose, the State feeds, houses and clothes those awaiting decisions on their claims, and ensures that their medical needs are catered for. By way of illustration, a sum in the region of €340 million was spent in 2002 on State services for asylum seekers.
It is an undeniably fair and generous system. It is not without room for improvement. Those who are operating this independent system acknowledge that, notwithstanding the great improvements that have taken place in the Irish asylum process in recent years, there are some in-built inefficiencies which require statutory amendment. The Minister is striving for a system, which continues to provide the requisite high standard of fairness, but achieves that standard with more efficient use of time and resources.
The demands of the public for efficient use of the resources being expended on services for asylum-seekers is not exclusively a question of the cost of investigating asylum applications, which is a matter within the Minister's area of responsibility. By achieving greater efficiencies through a reduction in the large-scale abuse of the asylum process, we can inevitably bring about substantial savings right across the Exchequer, in the budgets of all the other Departments involved in providing services for asylum-seekers. What is more, we can achieve this without any compromise in the fairness of our asylum process.
The Minister is concerned at the extraordinarily low proportion of those who, after having their claims examined by this independent process and, as appropriate, exercising their right of appeal, are actually found to be refugees. Most people who claim to be fleeing from persecution are not fleeing persecution at all. Even allowing some margin for those who, while not strictly within the criteria of the Geneva Convention relating to the status of refugees, are otherwise in need of the protection of the State, the fact, independently arrived at by the Refugee Applications Commissioner and the Refugee Appeals Tribunal, is that close to nine out of every ten asylum applicants in Ireland have no basis for their claim to be refugees. That bespeaks unsustainably high levels of abuse of a system designed to help the weak and unprotected.
It is not fair to the vulnerable individuals who have genuine claims, and whose recognition is delayed by unfounded asylum claims. It is not fair to those who pay Irish taxes to maintain that 90% while their claims are being examined. The Minister has no intention to do anything that would undermine the sound principles on which that system is built. However, it is not a corollary of a fair system that it should be supine in the face of obvious abuse as if such abuse were of no real consequence for those who genuinely seek the protection of the State. Nor is it an essential element of a fair system that it involves unnecessarily elaborate processes or protracted timescales.
Since the commencement of the Refugee Act in November 2000, the present Refugee Applications Commissioner and her staff, and the chairperson and other members of the Refugee Appeals Tribunal, have between them achieved the significant objective of dealing fairly and efficiently with the backlog of cases with which they were faced and bringing their workload more and more up to date. A measure of the improvements in turnaround time which have been achieved is that applicants who applied this February are already being scheduled for interview. The Minister is greatly appreciative of the work that Bernice O'Neill and PJ Farrell have done and continue to do in the refugee determination process.
As with any new system experience in the first few years of operation has brought to light ways to improve even further the efficiency of the current asylum process while in no manner compromising our obligations to those in need of protection. This Bill is an opportunity to bring forward those improvements by way of amendment to the Refugee Act. Some of these were in the Bill as published, more were included by way of amendments in the Seanad and a further set of amendments is being developed which I expect will be the subject of amendments on Committee Stage in this House.
I will go into a little more detail as to the content of those amendments when dealing with the provisions of the Bill in a few moments, but the purpose of these amendments is to defend the integrity of the refugee process as the means for giving the protection of the State to those who are actually in need of it, to discourage the abuse of the process by those who are not refugees and to get people who turn out to have no right to be here out of the State as quickly as possible.
These aims are consistent with the approach of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, which continues to emphasise, most recently in its Agenda for Protection programme, the need not only to strengthen the implementation of the convention for genuine refugees and deal with the root causes of refugee movements, but also to safeguard asylum systems from abuse by returning those not entitled to or in need of international protection to their countries of origin.
Briefly, this Bill provides for the following four main areas. It provides a scheme of carrier liability designed to ensure to the greatest extent possible that when people arrive in the State, from places other than the common travel area with the United Kingdom, they have proper travel documentation. That matter is dealt with in sections 1 to 3. There is provision for some other amendments to current immigration law, in particular, the provision at section 7, which is largely technical in nature. As I have indicated already, section 6 of the Bill amends the Refugee Act 1996 in a number of significant respects.
Section 4 creates offences relating to employment of non-nationals without employment permits. As that provision has now been incorporated in a recently enacted Bill promoted by the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, the Minister will be proposing the deletion of this section from the Bill on Committee Stage.
Turning to the carrier liability provisions of the Bill, I should like to give Deputies a general view of what is proposed in section 2 of the Bill and its purpose. The principal aim of the section is to put in place legislative provisions which will have the effect that carriers, in other words those responsible for aircraft, sea-going vessels or road vehicles coming into Ireland, will check before embarking on the journey that everyone coming on board for the journey has the proper travel documentation that is required for passing through Irish immigration controls. Of course this system could not apply to flights, sea-trips or road journeys coming from the United Kingdom into Ireland – the common travel area arrangements mean that Irish and UK citizens can travel between the jurisdictions without any requirement to carry a passport; so the Bill is designed to apply only to journeys into the State from places other than the UK, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.
Section 2, which contains the core of these provisions, sets out the obligations being placed on a carrier whose vehicle arrives in the State. Section 2(1) spells out what those obligations are. The first two paragraphs give statutory weight to the normal co-operation with the immigration authorities that most carriers at present offer as a matter of routine business practice in disembarking their passengers. The last element, at paragraph (c), states that the carrier must ensure that the disembarking non-national passengers must have the right documentation. For carriers to ensure that these things are in order at the end of the journey, they will have to do in respect of journeys into Ireland what they already have to do with regard to journeys in the other direction, that is, to have in place systems at the start of the journey to check their passengers' documents.
What are the right documents? First, a passenger must have a valid passport. For EU nationals, the identity card issued by many member states to their own citizens meets that requirement. Nationals of certain non-EU countries also require a visa of one of two types, depending on their nationality and whether they want to visit the country or merely to transit a seaport or, more usually, an airport. The categories of non-nationals who do not require a visa to enter Ireland are currently set out in the Aliens (Visas) (No. 2) Order 2001; anyone not in those categories needs a visa. That order also lists the small number of countries whose nationals must be in possession of a transit visa if they wish to make a journey which involves transiting through an Irish port, as distinct from actually entering Ireland. Details are published on the website of the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform and are kept up to date as new orders are made from time to time.
This provision, as in most other jurisdictions, is designed to enlist the help of carriers, within the scope of their competence, in cutting down the opportunity for abuse or circumvention of legitimate immigration controls. The Bill takes a "carrot and stick" approach to this. The "stick" element is that failure to observe the obligations is to be an offence, punishable by a flat €3,000 fine. That is set out at section 2(4) and (7).
Section 3 provides a means, similar to the system at present in relation to parking offences, where the carrier can avoid court proceedings by payment of a fixed penalty, in this case €1,500, within 28 days of receiving the notice of intention to prosecute.
The "carrot" element has a number of constituents. Of prime importance is the co-operation that, in advance of this Bill's enactment, already exists in large measure between the Garda national immigration bureau and various groups of carriers both centrally and at local level to help reduce immigration abuses. While constructive consultations on the development of this proposal have taken place with the representatives of all sectors operating commercially into Ireland from the Continent and from further afield, it is not invidious to single out for special mention the Irish Road Haulage Association, representing the owners and operators of road freight vehicles.
As part of these consultations, that association, together with officials at the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform and the then Department of Public Enterprise and representatives of the Garda national immigration bureau developed a set of guidelines which provide a checklist for long distance lorry operators so that they can minimise the scope for their vehicles being used for the clandestine carriage of people. Section 2(8) will give a statutory basis for guidelines of this type, another aspect of the "carrot" element of this proposal.
Observance by hauliers of these guidelines will have two effects. In practical terms it will help to protect them and their cargo from the activities of smugglers of human beings and, as far as this new law is concerned, it will go towards assisting them in dealing with any prosecution that might arise, in the event that covert passengers succeed in boarding their vehicles unknown to them, on the basis of the "all reasonable steps" defence at subsection (5). The defences provided at subsections (5) and (6) are further parts of the "carrot" incentive. Thus, a carrier who has sensible procedures in place at the point of embarkation to check documents and can show that those procedures were operated properly in the instant case, would be able to invoke the subsection (5) defence.
Subsection (6) underlines the position that carriers are not expected to engage in minute examination of all documents for potential forgery. From our own experience and the experiences of other member states, we know the reality of document fraud ranges from basic and crude attempts at forgery and falsification to high quality forgeries and falsification methods, including photo substitutions, which might only be detected by an expert after recourse to sophisticated equipment. Carriers are not being expected to spot any other than the more obvious and well known forgery techniques.
This brings us back to the first constituent, which is co-operation between carrier staff and the immigration authorities. We are not concerned to clock up high numbers of convictions under this legislation. It is quite the opposite, since each conviction would represent another instance of an illegal entry into the State.
The Bill contains no sanction against the illegal entrants themselves; that is a matter dealt with separately in other legislation. It is properly dealt with separately because we recognise that some of those who make their way irregularly into Ireland do so because they wish to claim asylum and we have an international obligation to consider each such claim. The Refugee Act 1996 gives full statutory effect to that obligation and the carrier liability provisions of this Bill do not compromise the fulfilment of that obligation in any respect. In order to address in statutory form the unfounded assertion by some commentators that it would compromise those obligations, subsection (9) has been inserted into the Bill by the Seanad to put the matter beyond doubt. The Attorney General has advised that this provision is unnecessary from a strictly legal point of view, a view with which the Minister strongly agrees. However, he believes the law in this instance should explicitly reflect his policy commitment and that of the Government and the State to our responsibilities to those in fear of persecution and in need of Ireland's protection. This provision represents incontrovertible statutory evidence of the State's continuing commitment to honour and fulfil its convention obligations.
Why put these arrangements in place? The carrier liability provisions in the Bill will provide an important additional instrument in the existing immigration tool-kit to address what is a significant element in the illegal immigration trail, that of persons boarding transport to the State and arriving here without any documentation required for entry, such as a passport or visa. Its effect will be that carriers will carry out the most rudimentary of checks to ensure that a passport is valid and that it relates to the person presenting it and that, where necessary, there is a current valid visa in the passport. Nothing more is required. Carrier staff will be helped, as some are at present, by training and advice given by immigration officers to be able to spot the more obvious forgeries and falsifications.
It is basically a mechanical task. It is a task that carriers out of Ireland and throughout Europe and other western states have been undertaking for many years now. It is the work of a few moments for the most part – the passport is subject to a quick scrutiny at the check-in desk and handed back to the traveller. Ireland is the only member state of the European Union which does not have legislation providing for a scheme of carrier liability. That is why Deputies are familiar with these checks when they seek to visit other jurisdictions. Our participation in certain aspects of the Schengen Acquis with our EU partners means that we are subject to binding legal instruments in the area of carrier sanctions. These requirements inform the development of the Bill before us. However, apart from our EU requirements, the Minister is satisfied that there is a well established need for this form of immigration control to supplement the existing immigration controls at our borders and under the visa system to combat the growth in illegal immigration to the State.
Section 5 is a standard provision regarding the responsibility of officers of a body corporate for offences committed by the body. This is relevant to the provisions on carrier liability at section 2. Before coming to the Refugee Act amendments at section 6, I will briefly refer to section 7. This is a largely technical amendment. Its purpose is to restore to the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform a power to prescribe the ports and airports at which non-nationals coming from a place outside the State may land. Currently, the Minister would have to introduce primary legislation if he wished to designate any port in the State as one where non-nationals may land in the State. Clearly this is not an efficient way to do business. Without the flexibility to make suitable provisions by secondary legislation, which is always subject to review in any event by the Oireachtas, the potential delays involved in securing the passage of a Bill could create difficulties for port or airport authorities who must await the passage of such legislation before they could act legally to allow non-nationals to land at their ports.
Section 6 provides for amendments to the Refugee Act 1996. These fall into a number of broad categories as follows: technical amendments to do with the Refugee Advisory Board; the privacy of applicants; housekeeping matters regarding the Refugee Applications Commissioner and the Refugee Appeals Tribunal; clarification of the Minister's power to agree arrangements with UNHCR for bringing in refugees in Ireland for resettlement and streamlining the process for dealing with asylum applicants who withdraw or abandon their applications.
The first of these, paragraph (a) of the section, was designed to rectify a problem regarding the dates on which, under section 7A of the Refugee Act, the Refugee Advisory Board is to provide reports on the operation of the Refugee Act and other matters to do with the asylum process, which arose because of the unavoidable time delay between the passing in 1999 of the amendments which inserted that section into the Refugee Act and the commencement of that Act in November 2000. Due to the passage of time in this Bill's progress through the Oireachtas, the proposals for change in the Bill have been superseded and the Minister will bring forward on Committee Stage an amendment to replace the present paragraph (a)(i) with a more flexible provision which will cater for the establishment of the Refugee Advisory Board and its regular reports on asylum matters.
The revised proposal will not affect the measure at subparagraphs (ii) and (iii) to give the chairperson of the Refugee Appeals Tribunal an ex officio place on the Refugee Advisory Board. The Refugee Applications Commissioner's role in relation to the board is already specified in the legislation. Her function as an ex officio member is to act as secretary to the board. It makes sense also to have the chairperson of the other key independent body involved in the asylum process as an ex officio member.
Section 6(g) addresses the question of the privacy of applicants. It amends section 19 of the Refugee Act to remove the requirement of the Minister's consent where an asylum seeker himself or herself consents to be identified as such in the media. This change has been pressed for by many media interests, including some who have represented the current situation as being an absolute ministerial veto on any coverage of asylum matters. It is nothing of the sort. It is vital that asylum applicants, whose families may still be under threat in the home territory, should have a legal basis for protection of their privacy and the Minister is satisfied that the protection of the privacy of individual asylum seekers is sufficiently achieved without the additional requirement of ministerial consent.
Section 6(h) inserts an important provision into the Refugee Act which provides for arrange ments involving the Minister, in consultation with the Minister for Foreign Affairs, for the acceptance into the State, by agreement with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, of persons from around the globe who have already been identified by the UNHCR as persons fleeing persecution and in need of protection. This reinforces the solid commitment of the Government to assist the UNHCR in its resettling of displaced persons and, thus, to play our full part in the protection of those who really need protection.
The next group of amendments to the Refugee Act, which I will describe, is at paragraphs (i) and (j) of section 6. These amendments address issues identified largely through the practical experiences of the Refugee Applications Commissioner and the Refugee Appeals Tribunal over the two and a half years or so of their operation. They deal with two aspects of the offices of the commissioner and the chairperson of the tribunal respectively. The first aspect is provision for an emergency appointment of a person to fill an unexpected vacancy in either office, or a temporary inability of the office-holder to perform his or her functions. The Minister is of the view that it is prudent to take this opportunity to fill that lacuna in the present Act. The second aspect dealt with in these amendments is the setting out of the powers of the office-holder to manage the business of the office in each case. In this regard, the provision in relation to the chairperson of the Refugee Appeals Tribunal is set out in considerably more detail than that in relation to the commissioner. That is because, while the commissioner, as head of her office, can instruct or issue guidelines to her staff, the powers given to the tribunal chairperson must respect the independence of each individual member in the exercise of his or her functions and, in particular, in deciding individual appeals.
Two further matters are provided at paragraph (j) in relation to the tribunal. One of these, at paragraph (j)(i), changes matters so that in the event of a casual vacancy in the membership of the tribunal the new appointee is appointed for a full three-year term, rather than the present arrangement whereby such an appointment is only to serve out the remainder of the term of the member being replaced. There is no particular benefit to be achieved by that arrangement and no good reason why there should not be overlaps of membership. The other additional matter is a provision for the preparation by the tribunal chairperson of annual reports and of reports on a one-off basis for submission to the Minister. These provisions at present exist for the commissioner.
I now come to the most technically detailed of the Refugee Act amendments; that is the package of amendments at paragraphs (b) to (f) of section 6 which, taken together, provide a revised system for dealing with withdrawn and abandoned cases under the Refugee Act. In particular, it tackles the issue of applications where it is clear that an applicant is no longer demonstrating any interest in pursuing an asylum claim and, indeed, may no longer be in the State. These changes are designed to address actual problems that have been experienced on a significant scale in dealing with asylum applications under the Refugee Act's provisions, which have been in operation since November 2000.
The first phenomenon tackled is that of persons who apply for asylum – usually at a port of entry, which means that they must be allowed to enter the State – and then simply disappear. They never supply a contact address, either then or subsequently and, as a result, are untraceable. There are approximately 1,000 such cases on hand which cannot be processed or finalised in any way and the number is rising daily. In order to address this position, paragraph (b) amends section 9 of the Refugee Act to provide that where an applicant fails to inform the commissioner of his or her address within five working days of the making of the asylum application, the application shall be deemed withdrawn. The Minister is satisfied that five working days – in effect, a full week – is ample time in which the applicant can get his or her bearings in the State, almost invariably with the help of the reception and integration agency, and fulfil the very simple task of letting the commissioner know his or her address. To underline the seriousness with which we view failure to provide an address in order that the application can be dealt with, (b)(iii) makes it an offence, punishable by a fine of up to €635, to fail to supply an address or change of address.
Another feature of the Irish asylum process is the high proportion of cases where the Refugee Applications Commissioner is unable to complete her investigation of the asylum claim because the applicant does not turn up for interview – an essential part of the investigation. Of the 12,677 interviews scheduled in 2002, it was possible to proceed with only 47%, or just under 6,000. In each of those cases, the Refugee Act at present requires that the applicant be asked again to attend for interview. Of those who did not show for interview when first asked, a total of 1,380 failed again to attend the second time, which is the equivalent of one in eight of all asylum applications lodged in 2002.
The waste of time and resources on each no-show represents time and money that could be far better spent investigating the applications of people who are genuinely interested in being protected by this State from persecution. In order to address this in a more efficient way, but a way that still is fair to those who are forced through illness or some other pressing emergency to look for a rearranged interview, the Bill provides for a number of amendments to section 11 of the Refugee Act.
The key amendments are at section 6(c)(iii) as follows – the new subsection (9) to section 11 of the 1996 Act provides a statutory basis for an applicant to withdraw the asylum claim volun tarily and the new subsection (10) deals with the situation where the applicant fails to show for interview. Unless the applicant has a reasonable explanation for not turning up and gives it either before the date fixed for the interview or within three working days after the no-show, the application will be deemed withdrawn. The new subsection (11) deals with less direct forms of non-co-operation. The form of non-co-operation of the kind referred to in paragraph (a) of the new subsection (11) usually, but not always, manifests itself first when a letter to the applicant about some aspect of the claim for asylum is returned by An Post marked “not known” or “gone away”.
Paragraph (b) of new subsection (11) covers a situation where the Minister becomes aware that the applicant is missing. This may come about because the Garda Síochána may indicate that an applicant has consistently been failing to observe a requirement to report once a week to a Garda under section 9(5); the reception and integration agency notes an absence from the assigned accommodation that it has provided for the applicant; or information comes to hand in some other way that an applicant is no longer at the address supplied. In any case like this, where the strong indications are that the applicant is not going to be around to assist in the investigation of his or her asylum application, once the Minister passes this information to the commissioner, the commissioner will write asking the applicant whether he or she is still pursuing the application. If there is no reply to this “one last chance” letter, the application is deemed withdrawn.
Section 6(d) amends section 13 of the Act of 1996 and provides that on the withdrawal of an application the investigation of the claim is brought to an end; the report of the commissioner, which is prepared in all cases, will include a recommendation that the applicant not be declared a refugee and no appeal lies from that recommendation; and, as a consequence, the negative recommendation is sent directly to the Minister who will proceed to make the decision in each case that the applicant is not a refugee.
It is not just during the first-instance investigation that asylum claims are withdrawn or simply abandoned. While most abandoned cases arise during the first stage of the process, a surprising 11% of appeals made to the Refugee Appeals Tribunal – one out of every nine appeals made – are also abandoned. In order to discourage abandonment of appeals at the appeal stage, it is necessary to put in place provisions, analogous to those I have just described for the first-instance investigation, to deal with "no-shows" at appeal hearings and other indications that the applicant is not available to pursue the appeal.
The Bill addresses this at paragraph 6(e), which amends section 16 of the Refugee Act – the appeals section. Other amendments being made to that section arise out of the fact that a with drawal, whether actual or deemed, will be un-appealable and restates the existing statutory provision governing the withdrawal of appeals.
The last amendment in the series dealing with withdrawn and abandoned cases, at section 6(f) of the Bill, deals with the final outcome of an application that is withdrawn or deemed to be withdrawn. The outcome is, as I have already indicated, that the Minister will refuse to grant a declaration in every case where the negative recommendation arises out of a withdrawal or a deemed withdrawal. Of course, under present law, any applicant whose application has been rejected may seek the Minister's permission under section 17(7) of the Act to make a fresh application, and this Bill does not interfere with that.
These are the amendments to the Refugee Act 1996 that already appear in the Bill before the House. I will now outline the further amendments, which are in preparation and which the Minister intends to put to Government for bringing forward on Committee Stage. His proposals include provisions for a speedy – in some instances, very rapid – process for dealing with applications that are either what one might call manifestly well-founded or which have characteristics indicating that undue time and resources should not be wasted upon them. A particular example of a class of cases of the latter type concerns persons coming from candidate countries of the European Union, which are widely recognised as safe and generally do not give rise to well-founded claims of fear of persecution. The Minister is aiming for a position where applications selected on a basis such as this, can be investigated, decided upon, and any appeal dealt with within a matter of days after the person arrives in the State. The purpose will be twofold: first, to avoid the unnecessary expenditure of taxpayers' money on supporting applicants whose claims are likely to be without merit; and to send a strong signal to potential abusers of Ireland's asylum system, and to those who expect to profit from them, that there is no point in making an unfounded claim for protection in Ireland.
The Minister is also developing amendments to deal more effectively with those who come to Ireland to claim asylum even though they have had ample opportunity to avail themselves of protection in safe countries through which they have travelled. It cannot be right that people who are genuinely fleeing persecution should studiously avoid seeking the protection available in any one of several countries of transit, which are safe havens and willing to offer refuge to them, simply to suit themselves or, more usually, to suit the people-smugglers to whom they have paid their life savings or may still owe money. The Minister's aim is to improve the turnaround time for such applicants, who can expect to be sent promptly back to whatever safe country they have come through to have their asylum claims dealt with there.
The Minister is also examining the possibility of amendments to spell out in statute where the burden of proof lies in asylum cases and what factors are to be taken into account when assessing the credibility of an applicant, in particular, the extent to which an applicant who gives an obviously untrue or incomplete story about such readily verifiable matters as how he or she arrived in the State, is to be believed in the details which he or she gives regarding the asylum application itself.
Among the other areas which the Minister expects will be dealt with in the package of amendments which he will table on Committee Stage are: revised provisions for fingerprinting to improve the system's effectiveness in reducing the scope for multiple asylum applications or other abuses; powers for the Minister to set from time to time the priorities with which the two independent bodies, the commissioner and the tribunal, are to deal with different elements of their workload, though not interfering with the independence of their decision-making functions; other technical amendments on the sharing of information between the various agencies involved in the wider asylum process; and the publication of selected decisions of the Refugee Appeals Tribunal, which will greatly benefit practitioners, applicants and the staff of the commissioner.
The Bill will put in place a range of measures regarding immigration and its related issue, asylum, which will reduce the scope for abuse, reduce the incentive for abuse and deal justly and promptly with abuse where it does occur. I reiterate that the Bill does not interfere with the State's obligations under the 1951 Geneva Convention and the related 1967 protocol to provide refugee protection to those who require that protection. The Bill, along with the Committee Stage amendments in development, will provide a more solid foundation to ensure that these obligations are better complied with and that genuine refugees obtain protection more speedily.
I am pleased to bring this Bill before the Dáil and look forward to engaging in a constructive debate with Deputies on the important provisions contained in it. I commend the Bill to the House.
