Welcome to Europe. Not.

You are an Iraqi Kurd being persecuted by Sadaam Hussein's regime. You smuggle yourself across the border to Jordan. You hide in the back of a lorry and spend several days there, fearful but relieved to be putting distance between yourself and Iraq. At the German border the German police discover you, but you don't mind at first because now, for the first time in days, you know where you are - you're in a safe European country and you can apply for political asylum. But something is wrong, you are being held in detention, and the memories of Sadaam's prisons are coming back. And then you are being told that you cannot apply for asylum in Germany because you passed through other countries in the lorry and you should have applied for asylum there. You ask what countries you passed through; you say that you did not know where you were, that you had no way of stopping the lorry, but nobody listens. You are being sent back to somewhere else, and that somewhere else is going to start looking at the lorry's route also, figuring out just how far back down the line you can be pushed. You're in a game of pass the parcel. Will you be passed all the way back to an Iraqi prison? Welcome (not) to Fortress Europe.

In September 1997, the Dublin Convention came into force. This means that you can only apply for political asylum in one EU state - if you're turned down there, you cannot apply for asylum anywhere else in the EU. Sounds sensible. Yes, up to a point. But not all EU countries apply the same standards, so it's a game (another one) of hit and miss. Take the case of a Somali woman under threat of death from one of the militias running that country. If she applies for protection in the UK, she has a chance of getting refugee status. But if she applies for protection in Germany, they will turn her down because they will say that the absence of a formal Somali government means she is not suffering state persecution (though she has difficulty understanding the difference between a government and the militia that runs her region). She is unlucky - she applies for asylum in Germany first and they turn her down. Then she tries to apply to the UK, and they tell her that they might have accepted her application but the Dublin Convention means she can only apply once in the EU - one strike and you're out, sorry about that. She thought she had fled arbitrary injustice, instead she ran straight into it.

Let's change that last example around a bit. The Somali woman has heard about German policy and knows that her best chance of finding sanctuary is to get to the UK. Also, she has a sister in London, whereas she doesn't know anyone in Germany and she doesn't speak German. But her flight transits through a German airport for 45 minutes, and when she gets to the UK the British police tell her she should have applied in Germany - that was the first country she got to even though she never even saw any immigration officials in Germany. Her sister is waiting for her at the airport but is not allowed see her. She asks if she can appeal the decision and she is told yes - but she has to go back to Germany to wait for the outcome of the appeal. At least she is informed of the decision in her own language through an interpreter; if she was in France, she would be told the decision in French only, regardless of whether she understood a word of what was being said - figure it out for yourself.

The Irish government, by the way, loves the Dublin Convention, and not just because it's named after our capital city. The Convention says you can only apply in one country, and that should usually be the one you passed through first. Not many asylum-seekers are going to arrive in Ireland without passing through some other EU country first. For example, if France can be persuaded to abide by the terms of the Convention, all those Romanians arriving in Wexford could be sent back to France. So they could be somebody else's problem and we could go back to priding ourselves on how generous we are towards those less fortunate than ourselves - in the abstract.

It's not only other EU countries to which the 'parcel' of the asylum-seekers can be 'passed'. EU countries also have lists of 'safe third countries' outside the EU hat people can be sent back to. Trouble is different EU countries have different ideas of what constitutes a safe third country. Austria, for example, has an interesting list - it includes Turkey, Iran and Algeria. Other EU states might not regard those as safe third countries but, hey, if you applied first in Austria and they sent you back to Algeria then that's good enough for all the other EU governments regardless of what they think of the level of protection you might get in Algeria. There have been 80,000 extra-judicial murders in Algeria since 1992.

And it's not just Austria which has strange attitudes towards regimes like that of Algeria. In July 1996, Belgium forcibly deported Bouasria Ben 'Othman to Algeria despite evidence that his life was at risk there. He was arrested on his return to Algeria and, in December, he died in detention, apparently under torture. His family was told he had thrown himself out of a window.

Of course, we're assuming up to now that you even get as far as the EU to make an asylum claim in the first place. EU governments have strict visa requirements for most countries of the world. You can't legally travel to Europe from most parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America without a valid visa. And how do you get a visa? Well, you go to the relevant European embassy in your own country and you make your application. Think about it: if you're being persecuted by your own government, what are the chances that you can pop along to your capital city and drop into a foreign embassy without being picked up by the police?

OK, instead you take your chances and turn up at the airport, trying to get straight onto a flight to Europe. You're lucky - you get past the airport security people. You get to the check-in counter but then the airline staff tell you no, we can't let you onto this flight without a valid visa. You try to explain your case but they don't care because if the airline carries you without a visa they get fined by their home government (£2,000 per passenger in the UK, for example). Maybe the person at the check-in is sympathetic, but she knows she'll lose her job is she lets you on board.

Sometimes the consequences are more serious if you do get on board. In May 1996, three Romanian asylum-seekers stowed away on a Taiwanese container ship. When they were discovered, the crew simply threw them overboard rather than risk the $6,000 per person fine if they had been allowed land in Canada. The same type of horror, usually unreported, must happen in the Mediterranean and in other channels to Europe.

So you try one last desperate strategy - you pay a fortune to a forger to get hold of a fake passport and visa. And it works. You get to Europe and apply for asylum. Only to be told that your claim is being treated with the utmost suspicion because you committed a criminal offence - travelling under false documents. You wonder if it's a joke, but nobody's laughing. And, especially in the UK, there's a good chance that you will be held in detention - though you have committed no crime in any real sense of the word - in such cases while your future is determined by others.

For those who slip through all these nets, further horrors may await. A typical example is that of Algerian asylum-seeker Nasr B., reported to have been assaulted by Berlin police in March 1997 after he was falsely accused of a mugging. His right arm was fractured. Racist attackes against refugees, asylum-seekers, immigrants and black people are on the rise throughout Europe.

Since 1987 the acceptance rate for asylum applications in the EU has fallen rom 50 per cent to 10 per cent. There is no evidence that the human rights situation in the countries people are fleeing from has got better since 1987, so why are more and more applications being turned down?

Because the intention is not to treat each case fairly - the intention is to keep the numbers down, to keep people out. And the ones who get to make a claim at all may be the lucky ones.

One thousand asylum-seekers have died trying to enter the EU - they have drowned in boats in the Mediterranean, or smothered to death in container lorries. One of them - a Roma from Serbia called Todor Bogdanovic - was shot dead by French border police in 1995. He was eight years old.

Welcome to Europe.

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