UK plans for offshore asylum ‘processing centres’ could struggle to find a home

Reported proposals for the UK to establish overseas “processing centres” for asylum seekers have hit major obstacles before even being presented to parliament.

In the coming weeks, Priti Patel is expected to set out plans to overhaul the UK’s asylum and immigration system.

They are believed to include a consultation on changing the law so asylum seekers can be sent to processing centres overseas.

Gibraltar and the Isle of Man were floated as potential locations in media reports, but both territories quickly appeared to snuff out any possibility of involvement.

The government of Gibraltar, which is a British Overseas Territory on Spain's south coast, said it had not received any proposal on the issue from the UK.

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In a letter to the home secretary, chief minister Fabian Picardo said there were constitutional and legal issues, as well as “geographic limitations”.

Mr Picardo said that while “we will not ever shirk our responsibility” to help Britain, “our geography makes some things difficult, however, and the processing of asylum seekers to the UK in Gibraltar would be one of them”.

The letter added: “Immigration is an area of my responsibility as chief minister under the Gibraltar constitution and I can confirm that this issue has not been raised with me at any level.

“I would have made clear this is not an area on which we believe we can assist the UK.”

A spokesperson for the Isle of Man government said the crown dependency had not been contacted about any proposals.

“The Isle of Man is self-governing,” a statement added. “The UK government would not be able to open any sort of processing centre on the island without consent.”

The island’s parliament, the Tynwald, is not expected to approve any processing centre.

Other reports claimed that asylum seekers could be removed to Turkey if they had crossed to the UK “illegally”, and could then be repatriated to their home nation or a safe country they travelled through en route to Britain.

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But Turkey’s 2016 agreement on refugees with the EU was fraught with controversy and difficulty.

It aimed to stop crossings over the Aegean Sea by creating a system where people arriving on Greek islands by boat would be returned to Turkey, and EU member states would resettle Syrian refugees from there.

But thousands of asylum seekers remain stuck in squalid camps on Greek islands and numerous legal battles have been launched successfully contesting the position that Turkey is a safe country for refugees.

The UK government believes sending migrants to third countries for processing would be compliant with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), but that will probably be strongly contested if proposals are put to parliament.

Downing Street did not deny the Home Office is looking at proposals of using Gibraltar and other overseas territories to process asylum seekers.

The prime minister’s official spokesperson said: “I’m not going to pre-empt what we will set out in the coming weeks.

“I would just point back to what Priti Patel and the prime minister said before about the need not only to fix our asylum system but to try and ensure people aren’t making these incredibly dangerous journeys across the Channel.”

The home secretary has repeatedly vowed to make small boat crossings over the English Channel “unviable” but new records for daily arrivals were reached last year.

Experts, parliamentary committees and charities have long called for the government to reduce crossings by tackling the root causes of migration, rather than increasing penalties for those who make the journey.

Mike Adamson, chief executive of the British Red Cross, said: “Offshoring the UK’s asylum system will do nothing to address the reasons people take dangerous journeys in the first place and will almost certainly have grave humanitarian consequences.”