Confusion over Blair's asylum seekers plan

By Gavin Cordon and Jon Smith

Tony Blair’s latest initiative to stem the flow of asylum seekers to Britain was mired in confusion tonight as the Tanzanian government said it had rejected a deal to take failed Somali claimants expelled from the UK.

The Prime Minister disclosed that the Government was in talks with the east African state about UK officials processing asylum claims from refugees in that country before they head for Britain.

However the Tanzanian deputy home affairs minister John Chiligati said tonight that Tanzania had already turned down a request from Britain to take back failed asylum claimants from other African countries.

According to a report in The Guardian, the Government offered the Tanzanians a £4 million aid package if they would accept asylum seekers who had come to Britain from neighbouring Somali.

In the an interview with the BBC World Service’s World Today programme, Mr Chiligati confirmed that a team of officials from the Home Office visited Tanzania last year.

“They put up that proposal that they want a number of refugees to be sent to Tanzania, and from here they can be sorted out and repatriated to their own countries. But that proposal was not accepted by our government because already we have enough of a refugee problem,” he said.

“We have already given our categorically negative response because we have probably the biggest number of refugees in the world. We have 700,000 refugees from different countries, and that is enough. We cannot take more from Britain.

“We were negotiating, yes. But we have already given them our answer, a negative answer. Maybe his (Mr Blair’s) officials have not reported back to the Government.”

A Home Office spokeswoman said tonight that the discussion with the Tanzanians were in an “early stage”.

She refused to be drawn on the earlier talks about sending back failed Somali asylum seekers to Tanzania.

However she said that officials were discussing proposals with the government in Dar es Salaam to repatriate Tanzanians who had come to Britain claiming to be Somalis.

Earlier, at Prime Minister’s Questions, Tony Blair carefully side-stepped a question from Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy about the proposal to send back claimants to Tanzania.

Instead, he disclosed that the Government was now discussing the option of British officials processing asylum claims in Tanzania.

“We are in negotiations with the Tanzanian government as to how we can process claims for asylum nearer to the country of origin. That is a sensible thing,” he said.

Mr Kennedy said tonight that the original proposal to pay a third world country “in return for taking people off our hands” raised some “rather disturbing implications”.

“Not for the first time and I dare say not for the last the Prime Minister chose to address a rather significantly different question from the one I was asking,” he told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme.

“It is not an issue here of processing people here closer to their country of origin.

“It is a matter of people who actually come to our country, for whatever reasons, who seek to achieve asylum status who are then denied it, who are then being sent potentially to a third country with a cheque attached to take the matter off our hands.”

Mr Blair’s spokesman said tonight that if the talks were successful in enabling British officials to process asylum claims in Tanzania, the scheme could be extended to other countries.

Negotiations were already taking place with one other government in the region, he said.

“This is a pilot, so if it is successful I don’t rule out us looking at this in terms of other countries,” he said.

The move follows an upsurge in asylum applications from Somalis, who fled from the civil war in their own country to Tanzania before trying to reach the UK. More Somalis applied for asylum last year than any other nationality.

The Tories seized on Mr Blair’s comments to claim he had now switched to supporting their policy of processing all asylum seekers offshore.

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said: “This smacks of sheer hypocrisy. The Government has continually mocked Conservative plans to deal with asylum seekers offshore, and now they have decided to adopt them on the quiet.

“It is not as if the Government isn’t aware of the asylum problem, it’s just that they have no idea of a solution and as a result their policy is in chaos.”

Oxfam tonight warned the Government that any deal to make aid to Tanzania conditional on co-operation with asylum applications would be illegal.

“It would go against the International Development Act, which ensures that aid must be focused on poverty elimination and not used for other purposes,” a spokesman said.

“It would also go against the 1951 Refugee Convention, which states that asylum seekers should not be returned to a place in which their safety, or protection, cannot be guaranteed.”