2. Having stated our objection to the screening idea, we are appalled at the actual process of screening, the effect that this has on the applicants as reported widely and passionately by independent and legal organisations such as Amnesty International, Federation International des droits de l'homme, and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. Essentially the screening process has gone badly wrong because:
3.
the key people of the process (i.e. the examiners) are selected from an inappropriate quarter for the highly sensitive task and not adequately trained, supervised or accountable for any record keeping;
the technicians of the process (interpreters) are not competent. languistically as well as culturally and politically to understand the context in which complex issues are to be interpreted;
serious lack of information to guide the asylum seekers in making their claim and of support for him/her to communicate to officialdom with some ease. An ill-informed applicant being interrogated with hostility through several languages would stand very little chance of a fair hearing;
the preoccupation of the authorities in proving their own fixed belief or made belief that the majority of the claims are invalid; yet these are the authorities solely responsible for the whole procedure and would not agree to making room for improvement (i.e. unwilling to remove obstacles that prevent the better use of lawyers, interpreters and examiners.
Our position is that unless the criteria and quality of the screening procedure could be immediately and significantly improved, the whole process should be suspended while efforts from all concerned (UNHCR, Governments of countries other than Hong Kong and the UK as well as these two Governments and independent and legal organisations) be made to find a better solution. Continuing a process that has been proven to be full of miscarriage of justice and which has no real reasonable and human targets to aim for is a dangerous road to the point of hysteria on the part of the authorities concerned. The result would be large scale human suffering that is not acceptable in this day and age, i.e. unnecessary blood shed in a perfectly peaceful situation otherwise.
As long as the screening process stays ineffective there will be people wrongly screened out and those kept too long in detention, contravening the basic human rights as prescribed under article 2(1) and (9) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and articles 5(1) and (14) of the European Convention for the protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.
/contd......