Ghetto risk to asylum seekers, says group

GOVERNMENT policies are exposing asylum seekers to isolation and ghetto-isation, the State’s official human rights watchdog said yesterday.

The Human Rights Commission (HRC) has lodged a series of complaints with a high-level UN body, which will quiz representatives of the Irish Government in Geneva next week.

The UN Committee on Racial Discrimination will examine Ireland’s record in implementing the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD).

The Government filed its first national report under CERD to the committee last April.

The HRC and Traveller support group Pavee Point will be present at the two-day hearings next Wednesday and Thursday.

“We look forward to the dialogue that will take place between the Government and the CERD committee and to the publication of the committee’s observations, which we hope will spur the Government to take on a stronger and more proactive role in the struggle against racism,” said HRC president Maurice Manning.

He said asylum seekers had been the target of a high proportion of racist assaults in Ireland.

“Official Irish attitudes to asylum seekers have, up to now, been grudging and ungenerous and Government policy of direct provision of accommodation and maintenance and the prohibition on working, exposes asylum seekers to the risk of further isolation and ghettoisation of already marginalised people.”

He said the Government’s national report did not appear “to acknowledge the nature and scale of the problem of racism in Irish society”.

He said Government immigration policy was “haphazard and unplanned”.

Pavee Point criticised the Government’s refusal to recognised Travellers as a minority ethnic group, unlike Britain and Northern Ireland. It highlighted to CERD the poor health status of Travellers and the refusal of many GPs to take them as patients.