18/1/2002
Central and Eastern Europe Now a Destination for Asylum Seekers

A new report from the United Nations Refugee Agency, UNHCR, paints a fascinating picture of how asylum seeking has developed and changed over the last two decades. And it is a measure of the rapid rate of change that countries from which people were fleeing in the early eighties are now in their turn actually becoming havens for those seeking asylum.

Contrary, perhaps, to general perceptions most asylum seekers in the 1980's and 90's came from Europe itself, say UNHCR - from people fleeing communist regimes in the 1980s and then the disfiguring conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and their preferred destination was another part of Europe. After the relative stability of the 80's numbers of asylum seekers almost tripled, from a total of 2.3 million in the 1980's to 6.1 million in the 1990's, with Europe accounting, almost entirely, for the increase.

In the 1980's, people fleeing Turkey, Poland and the Iranian Islamic Republic had lodged the most asylum applications, but with the collapse of communist rule in Eastern Europe and the Russia came disturbances and turbulence from which many sought refuge. Thus the number of applicants from the former Yugoslavia (including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and Slovenia) shot up from 68,000 in the 1980's to 877,000 the following decade, reflecting the widespread conflict which devastated the region, the peak year being 1992, when 856,000 applications were submitted.

Three-quarters of these refugees - 6.3 million people in all - filed for asylum in other European countries, according to the UNHCR study. Canada and the United States received two million applications, or 24 per cent, with Australia, New Zealand, and Japan together recording only 107,000 applications, just one percent of the total.

Bela Hovy, the Head of UNHCR's Population Data Unit, says "Asylum immigration became an important issue during the 1990's in Europe, with a significant share of immigration into Europe linked to asylum."

Within Europe there were significant changes over the two decades in the destinations that asylum seekers sought. Germany saw its percentage share drop from 45 per cent to 26 per cent as more people sought refuge in the United Kingdom whose share of asylum seekers more than doubled, from 6 to 14 per cent. The Netherlands and Switzerland also experienced rises, say UNHCR. On the other hand France's share of applications fell threefold in this period (from 17 to a mere 6 per cent) a result that UNHCR attribute to 'restrictive immigration policies brought about in part by the rise of politician Jean-Marie LePen's extreme-rightwing, anti-immigration National Front Party.'

The UNHCR data says much about the changing political face of the European continent. Who would have thought that twenty years ago Hungary would have been a destination for asylum seekers? - and yet it is. The annual number of applications filed in Central Europe quintupled during the 1990's, rising from 5,800 in 1990 to 27,300 in 1999, showing how countries that once produced refugees are now attracting asylum seekers in their turn.