According to the BBC, the British government has considered building an asylum processing centre on a UK territory in the Atlantic Ocean, with Home Secretary Priti Patel asking officials to look at similar asylum policies which had been successful in other countries.
The Financial Times said that Ascension Island, more than 4,000 miles from the UK, was a suggested location and the Foreign Office is understood to have carried out an assessment for Ascension, which included the practicalities of transferring migrants thousands of miles to the island, and decided not to proceed.
A Home Office source told the BBC:
“As ministers have said we are developing plans to reform policies and laws around illegal migration and asylum to ensure we are able to provide protection to those who need it, while preventing abuse of the system and the criminality associated with it.”
Labour’s shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds said:
“This ludicrous idea is inhumane, completely impractical and wildly expensive – so it seems entirely plausible this Tory government came up with it.”
Alan Nicholls, a member of the Ascension Island council, said moving asylum seekers more than 4,000 miles to the British overseas territory would be a “logistical nightmare” and not well received by the islanders.
The UNHCR Representative to the UK, Rossella Pagliuchi-Lor, said at a Home Affairs committee meeting today, 30 September, that it would
“change what the UK is – its history and its values”.
It was only a matter of time before Ascension Island came up in today's @CommonsHomeAffs. Here is some of @Refugees Rossella Pagliuchi-Lor's response: pic.twitter.com/wV9MZwdCOr
— Seth Farsides (at 🏠) (@sethfarsides) September 30, 2020
The policy is reminiscent of that of Australia’s ‘Pacific Solution’ initiative, where asylum seekers attempting to cross into the country are held in detention centres on Nauru and Manus Islands in Papua New Guinea. That model has been widely criticised and the centres were closed in 2017. Yet, as reported by the International Observatory of Human Rights, last year people remained stuck on the islands.
Seven years on, refugees are still stuck on Manus Island in Australia
At the committee meeting, Ms Pagliuchi-Lor also said the Australian model had
“brought about huge suffering for people, who are guilty of no more than seeking asylum, and it has also cost huge amounts of money”.
Immigration and asylum continues to be a contentious issue, with more than 5,000 people crossing the English Channel so far this year – mostly on small inflatable boats. A record 416 made the journey in one day in early September.
Priti Patel has called on the Royal Navy to help tackle the growing number of small boats and appointed a former Royal Marine, Dan O’Mahoney, to the role of “clandestine Channel threat commander”. In August she said the number of crossings was “appalling and unacceptably high”, adding:
“I am working to make this route unviable.”