Planned fines for carriers transporting undocumented migrants would almost certainly drive more asylum-seekers into the arms of traffickers, a committee of Catholic bishops warns today.
Four leading bishops want the Government to abandon its plans to introduce on-the-spot fines of £2,500 for each undocumented passenger brought to Ireland by carriers such as airlines and ferries.
In a highly critical document published today, the refugee committee of the Irish Bishops' Conference says such sanctions would force carrier staff to become proxy immigration officials.
Penalties would push carriers into refusing any passenger whose documentation seemed in the slightest way "inadequate", the bishops say. This would "bear heavily on asylum-seekers, who are often forced to resort to forged documents in order to escape to safety".
Asylum-seekers are not debarred from making a claim for refugee status just because they have false or inadequate documents. They seek protection as refugees because they are fleeing persecution on grounds including race, religion or political opinion. Up to 10 per cent of asylum-seekers, most of whom are Nigerian or Romanian, are granted refugee status in Ireland.
The bishops' 15-page document, No Entry; Carrier Sanctions and the Pre-emptive Exclusion of Asylum-Seekers from Ireland, will be submitted to the Government.
The four-member refugee committee is chaired by an Auxiliary Bishop of Dublin, Dr Fiachra O Ceallaigh.
Many EU states already have carrier sanctions. However, Sister Joan Roddy from the refugee project said Ireland has to "look at itself and address the questions of justice to people".
Under international law, Ireland must process all asylum claims made by people in the State or at its frontiers.
The bishops' paper restates their strong concerns that asylum-seekers are being "preemptively excluded" from Ireland due to document controls by Irish Ferries staff on the route from Cherbourg in France to Rosslare. An "outer frontier" has been established in Cherbourg, choking off the inflow of asylum-seekers, they say.
The Cherbourg checks have led to a sharp drop in asylum claims in Rosslare, with 24 applications in the first five months of this year, compared with 514 for the same period last year. The Garda National Immigration Bureau has recently begun to advise Aer Lingus staff on how to identify false documents.
The bishops say that in Britain, where carrier sanctions have been in place for many years, British Airways has said that between 1987 and 2000 some 400 passengers who travelled with the airline on false documents were nonetheless granted refugee status.
The bishops also renew their call, first made in April 2000, for the Government to regularise the position of asylum-seekers already in the State. By eliminating the backlog of almost 13,400 cases, the authorities could achieve their target of processing applications within six months, they say.