Asylum: Undocumented Migrants

(asked on 10th January 2019) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, further to his oral statement of 7 January 2019 on Migrant Crossings, Official Report column 85, whether asylum seekers arriving on the Kent Coast since 1 October 2018 have had their applications for asylum processed using standard procedures.


Answered by
Caroline Nokes Portrait
Caroline Nokes
This question was answered on 15th January 2019

Over 500 migrants, the majority of whom are Iranian nationals, attempted to travel to the UK on small vessels in 2018. The vast majority of those attempts were made in the last three months of the year.

All asylum claims made in the UK are processed, managed and decided in line with Home Office policy, guidance and relevant case law and legislation. This supports an efficient and effective asylum process for the UK and ensures that asylum claims are handled in a manner that is appropriate to the individual, including ensuring any reasonable adjustments and safe-guarding needs are considered.

All asylum claimants must be treated with dignity and fairness regardless of their age, disability, ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion or belief.

An asylum claim will be registered where an individual makes a particularised protection claim for the first time, in person and in their own right. That does not mean that the UK will always be responsible for making a substantive decision.

As part of that process, there is a need to assess whether what a person is saying amounts to a protection claim and if so, whether the claim is admissible to the decision-making process. Inadmissibility is a concept by which the Home Office can decline to consider an asylum claim because the individual already enjoys sufficient protection in another country, or another country is responsible for considering the claim.

We are unable to state how many asylum seekers arriving on the Kent coast since 1 October 2018 have had their claims registered and processed using standard procedures, as we do not comment on the status of cases once they have claimed asylum.

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