The Irish Refugee Council have voiced concerns regarding amendments to the Illegal Immigrants (Trafficking) Bill recently put forward by the Minister for Justice, John O Donoghue. These amendments, issued on Tuesday May 30, propose granting the Gardai increased powers to detain and imprison unsuccessful asylum seekers whom they suspect may attempt to evade the deportation process.

He s amending previous legislation in which the Guards only had the power to detain somebody before they deported them if they had reasonable grounds to suspect that the person had failed to comply with the deportation order, says Sara MacNeice of the Council. But in this piece of legislation, basically what they re saying is that if a Guard suspects a person will not comply with the deportation order, they can imprison them until the deportation order is effected it s entirely up to the Guard who s dealing with you. This is basically reasonable suspicion and the Garda won t have to explain how he or she came to the conclusion that this person was going to abscond.
The Council s spokesperson has further concerns as to the period of detention prospective deportees might face.
The Immigration Act says that you can only be detained for up to two months, she continues, but because these people will probably be detained simultaneously to having deportation orders put on them, then it s probably going to take way more than two months to organise their removal from the state or make sure that their home country is safe for them to go back to.
I think what we re seeing now is more that these policies are being put in place to stop people coming into the country in the first place. The scheme of giving them #15 a week instead of the system that was in place previously, and housing them together in these hostels and telling them they can t move from there for the period of their asylum application, is all an effort to ensure that people don t come here and feel comfortable in the system. It s basically to send a message out that Ireland isn t the right place to seek asylum in.
And while our organisation would accept that the Minister for Justice has the right to deport people from the country we re not saying there should be an open door policy but you have to look at why these policies are being created. This detention thing is potentially going to infringe the rights of people who don t get asylum and you could be talking about a situation of, effectively, mass detention.
The existing section 5 (1) of the Immigration Act provides that where a Garda or immigration officer, with reasonable cause, suspects the deportee has failed to comply with the deportation order, he or she may be arrested without warrant and detained with a view to ensuring deportation. The amendments the Minister plans to introduce will enable a Garda or immigration officer to detain the deportee when, with reasonable cause, they suspect that he or she:

intends (my italics) to leave the State and without lawful authority enter another state in effect, to abuse the common travel area arrangements between here and the UK,
has destroyed his or her identity documents or is in possession of forged identity documents, or
intends (again, my italics) to avoid removal from the State.

Just one of the questions the Refugee Council are most concerned about is where the Minister intends on detaining these deportees.
Unfortunately we haven t been told about the prescribed places themselves, says Sara MacNeice. The Minister suggested that he was going to put people in cells in Garda stations, and the Guards actually came back and said, Look, these plans are just not going to work. So he hasn t come back again and said, Well it s not going to be Garda stations, it s going to actually be Mountjoy Prison, but there s every possibility.
At the moment the Minister is setting up a special new Garda unit to deal with the deportee issue. When hotpress contacted the Press and Information Office for the Minister and Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform in order to determine exactly where these failed asylum seekers might be detained, a spokesman had this to say:
As it stands at the moment, if they re taken into custody in the Garda station, the maximum they would be held there is 48 hours. If it was going to be any longer than that, they would be provided with appropriate accommodation, obviously low security stuff. But I would assume that before the Gardai would move in on a case like that, they would have the procedure fairly well there, so it wouldn t be a case of having to hold them for a week or two weeks or whatever.
And what about the Refugee Council s worries that, theoretically, the deportees could be held in Mountjoy?
Well, look, this is only in cases where they would be suspicious that it would be necessary to detain somebody. This doesn t mean that everybody who is going to be deported is automatically going to be detained [although] there s good grounds for suspecting that too, on the basis that I think the Minister has issued something like 400 notices to failed asylum seekers this year and so far the immigration authorities have only been able to deport something like 20 or 25 of them the rest simply have disappeared. So it has to be seen in the context of that.
How does the Minister s office respond to the suggestion that the amendments are being rushed through?
The whole thing regarding deportations has been topical, particularly since the Laurentiu case of maybe two years ago, the spokesman counters. For example, there was a massive debate on the Immigration Act which came in last year, which allowed the Minister to deport. So to be honest with you, I would totally disagree with that. This latest amendment going through at the moment is just to enable the Gardai to actually carry out what s in the Immigration Act. There s been nothing but it in the papers since last January if you ask me, there s been a lot of public disquiet about it and the Minister on numerous occasions on radio, television and in print media has stated that he was looking at the whole area of deportations again with a view to bringing in legislation, so it s been signaled for months.
To date, the Minister for Justice has made 396 deportation orders. There have been supervised departures of 30 people and a further seven left the State before deportation could be effected. In another 60 cases, the deportation orders cannot be executed pending judicial review proceedings instigated by the deportees. In another ten cases, the deportation orders are being revoked, mainly on the advice of the Attorney General s Office. Travel documentation complications have held up 49 deportations, 91 deportees have failed to show up at the named Garda station at the appointed time and there have been 117 cases where removal could not be carried out because the persons were not at their last known address.
Taking these figures into account, would the Refugee Council favour an amnesty for long-term asylum seekers?
We haven t as yet initiated any sort of campaign in that sense, but rather than using the word amnesty , we re certainly looking at regularising people, Sara MacNeice explains. The reason that there are people who are in the system for three or four years is because the system hasn t been functioning properly, so effectively the failed asylum seeker has been punished by the state s ineptitude to run a proper system. This legislation at the moment suggests that people who are here three, four and five years will be subject to deportation orders. It s inhumane to lift those people out of the society that they consider nearly to be their own and deport them.
At the time of going to press, the proposed amendments were still before the Dail.