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Wednesday 17, September 2008
Budapest, September 17 (UNHCR) – A unique international project has been launched today in Budapest to review and develop the quality of asylum status decisions in eight European Union countries.
Would you be happy to sign documents you don’t fully understand? Would you be confident to tell very personal information about your life to someone whom you have never seen before? Would you be patient waiting for a decision about your future if it was going to be taken in a legal procedure you barely know anything about?
Many asylum-seekers going through the asylum procedure in Central and Eastern Europe feel the weight of these questions every day. All the more so, because it is the very outcome of the procedure – the legal status granted or not – that determines the set of challenges and problems that refugees face, in addition to their age, gender or cultural background.
Now Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, joined by Austria and Germany have set themselves the goal of reviewing and enhancing the quality of their refugee status determination systems.
In these eight countries, mechanisms of 1st and 2nd instance decision-making will be reviewed and developed in a unique project initiated by the UNHCR Regional Representation in Budapest with funding support from the European Commission. The findings and results of the project are expected to help the harmonisation of EU asylum legislation with a view to creating a common European asylum system by 2012.
UNHCR and Governments Will Co-Operate for Quality Development
In each country, there will be one National Evaluator, recruited by UNHCR, to work in the project, in close co-operation with UNHCR Protection Officers and local government asylum authorities. Throughout the eighteen months of the project, scheduled to finish in February 2010, the National Evaluators will sit in and observe asylum interviews and monitor decisions.
“Once we have fully understood all the steps of the 1st instance decision making process, we will start focusing on the 2nd instance. We will also organise trainings, including developing internal quality auditors in the government asylum agencies who can take over these tasks after the end of the project.” – says former Canadian refugee law judge Michael Ross, the Budapest based Regional Evaluator of the Asylum Systems Quality Assurance and Evaluation project also known as the Quality Initiative.
Today Budapest is hosting the first meeting of the National Evaluators, UNHCR Protection Officers and their government counterparts involved in the project. They are gathering for two days to learn about other Quality Initiatives going on in Europe (from experts representing the UK, Austria and Germany), build contacts and set up their work plans jointly.
In the two day conference, the participants will exchange information with each other about four key areas concerning the decision making process. Firstly, the “pre-hearing phase” between the arrival of an asylum-seeker and the asylum interview; secondly, the asylum interview itself; thirdly, the decision making process represented by the written decision; and finally, the training of asylum officers. These four areas have been identified by UNHCR as central to the development of a fair and quality-oriented refugee status determination system.
Gaps Before and During the Asylum Interview May Lead to Poor Decisions
UNHCR has found in Central and Eastern Europe that asylum-seekers often do not get sufficient written or verbal information about the asylum process that they have to undergo. Or, they may receive it in writing beforehand, but in a language they do not speak. There are gaps in the asylum interview as well, as in some countries interpreters tend to summarise what an asylum-seeker says instead of providing a verbatim translation.
As a result of the missing elements in the pre-hearing and hearing phases, asylum decisions may be very poorly done, and therefore, can lead to rejections and appeals. As a consequence of poor decisions and prolonged appeals procedures, asylum-seekers are often condemned to spend months of waiting with ever growing frustration and anxiety about their future.
Therefore, one of the aims of the Quality Initiative will be to work with the decision makers on how to write good decisions. “A decision should be like a story that anyone could pick up and read.” – Michael Ross explains. “It should contain what the asylum-seeker said, the objective facts about the asylum-seeker’s country of origin, as well as citations of the relevant law. Its conclusion should proceed logically from the analysis of these elements. And most importantly, each decision should be written keeping in mind that the decision maker bears the heavy responsibility of deciding the future of an individual human being.”
The Quality Initiative project, launched today, aims to achieve improvements in both the technical or procedural parts and the substantive parts of decision making. It is also expected that due to the trainings, the skills and capacities of the workforce involved in asylum decision making will also improve.
“Europe is alive with all sorts of quality improvement projects in the field of asylum.” – says Michael Ross. “In our project we will try to build on these, borrow best practices and work in a co-operative way. We will do everything we can to achieve systems of decision making that are better, more consistent and serve refugees in a fair and balanced way.”
Andrea Szobolits in Budapest, Hungary
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