Britain could accept more than 20,000 Syrian refugees and should stop detaining migrants for years, says Council of Europe commissioner

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Britain should take in more Syrian refugees, impose a time limit on migrant detention and loosen its “restrictive regime” on reunifying families, according to Europe’s most senior human rights official.

At the end of a week-long official tour of the UK, Nils Muižnieks, commissioner for human rights at the Council of Europe, warned about the growing “toxicity” of the debate over migration and called for greater efforts to be made to resettle refugees.

Muižnieks said: “I welcome that the UK has promised to resettle 20,000 people [from Syria]. [But] the UK could do more, given its size and the need elsewhere.

“I think the future is in resettlement, certainly in the medium to long term, to stop these dangerous crossings [of the Mediterranean]. We need to ramp up resettlement.”



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The Latvian official, who is based in Strasbourg, has spent a week talking to government ministers in London, Belfast and Edinburgh. He will publish a formal report on his findings later this year.

In London, he met the Home Office minister James Brokenshire, who is responsible for immigration, as well as Dominic Raab and Lord Faulks, at the Ministry of Justice, who are working on Conservative party plans to replace the Human Rights Act.

Muižnieks said: “I have a lots of concerns about the draft immigration bill, particularly about involving landlords in police checks [on tenants’ immigration status]. The atmosphere this creates is one in which direct and indirect discrimination becomes far more likely.

“I was told that 92% of people stay less than four months but I have heard of people being held for several years in migrant detention [centres in Britain]. That’s incompatible with human rights law and a waste of taxpayer’s money. I would like to see limits set on migrant detention.”



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Muižnieks also highlighted the plight of a small group of 67 asylum seekers who have been stranded on a British airbase in Cyprus for nearly two decades and refused permission to come to the UK.

“You have a group of asylum seekers in Cyprus,” he said, “some have been there for 17 years. This is the UK’s responsibility. I have raised this issue and asked why can’t we resolve it?

“There’s no way that resettling these 67 people to the UK after all these years will create a pull factor. These people deserve a life.”

Family reunification is a vital principle, Muižnieks added. “The best interests of childen must be for family reunification – as in the case of the children in Calais [where a family were recently allowed into the UK].

“The regime in the UK is quite restrictive, including on the financial income threshhold of £18,600, which those coming from outside the EU to join spouses in the UK must meet. It’s a huge figure for some people.

“The problem is that there’s a slow erosion of safeguards and growing toxicity in the migration debate,” he said. “The push factors of war, violence and torture are still there. Once you only talk about pull factors then integration gets thrown out the window.”