Ct is a subject that has until now been largely taboo, which the Observatory of Immigration and Demography (OID) has brought to light. In a note published exclusively The Pointentitled “Asylum, an immigration route out of control”, the think tank precisely documents, after months of research and studies, the extent and causes of the drift in the asylum regime In France.
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According to figures from Ofpra's 2023 activity report, nearly 600,000 people are direct beneficiaries of the right to asylum today, or more than 10% of the foreign population recorded in the country. The product of an explosion of first-time asylum applications received in France, increasing by 245% between 2009 and 2023. Going hand in hand with an increasingly expansive definition of the conditions allowing one to benefit from asylum, subject to control that is less and less in the hands of public authorities.
The right to asylum is in fact not subject to any quantitative limitNicolas Pouvreau-Monti
“The right to asylum is today the immigration channel over which States have the least control,” underlines Nicolas Pouvreau-Monti, director of the OID. It is governed “upstream” by major overarching treaties starting with the Geneva Convention of 1951 and “downstream” by the extensive interpretation made of these treaties by actors without direct democratic legitimacy, in particular administrative judges. » Based on the letter of the Geneva Convention, its New York Protocol, the European treaties, also and above all, the case law of both the Court of Justice of the Union (CJEU) and the Ofpra or the National Court of Asylum (CNDA), the Observatory has managed to estimate the number of people, throughout the world, country by country, likely to rightly claim protection from France under the terms of asylum.
-According to the OID, the number of potential beneficiaries is 1,000 times higher than the number of current asylum beneficiaries in France. That is to say 580 million people – according to a low range – without any safeguards being able, in the state of the law, to be opposed to them, insists Nicolas Pouvreau-Monti: “The right of asylum is in fact not subject to with no quantitative limit, neither overall, nor by country, nor in flow, nor in stock. As soon as an individual meets the criteria for asylum and manages to submit an application – which generally requires reaching French territory – they will benefit from asylum. Nothing is provided in our law to deal with an influx that is not absorbable. »
Initially imagined as a right intended “for a limited number of intellectuals”, in the words of the former Minister of Foreign Affairs Maurice Couve de Murville, the right to asylum has gradually seen its three definition criteria become the subject of of an extensive interpretation. The notion of “persecution” has gradually been extended to gender- and sex-related violence. The notion of “social group” has been taken in its broadest acceptance by case law. Thus “women” or “homosexuals” are now likely to be considered as a persecuted social group as such. Finally, the notion of “agent of persecution” has also evolved to cover non-state groups, or even simple private individuals…
This is how the Court of Justice of the European Union was able to judge last July that “the situation of women under the new Taliban regime justified, in itself, recognizing them as refugees”. Or the CNDA to ensure in November 2023 that homosexual people constituting in Burma a social group exposed to persecution, all are entitled to claim refugee status… And this, without either the government authorities or the national representation can oppose democratic control. “Ofpra is an agency with functional independence, to which the Ministry of the Interior has chosen to entrust asylum policy, without any guarantee of consistency with migration policy,” underlines Nicolas Pouvreau-Monti. The same type of observation applies, unfortunately, to the CNDA: the existence of a specialized jurisdiction leads to a certain porosity between its staff and the associative world. Not to mention that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees appoints assessor judges, who tend to uphold the maximalist vision of asylum. »
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Among the solutions recommended by the Observatory of Immigration and Demography is the return to the government of the power to determine the list of safe third countries currently vested in Ofpra; the refusal of any asylum request from an applicant who has already been refused in another Member State of the European Union; make the status of asylum seeker less attractive by limiting financial aid and by moving towards outsourcing the processing of applications outside mainland France. The idea, although widely defended on the right of the political spectrum, of having asylum applications submitted in the country of origin is ruled out by the Observatory. This would, according to him, lead to a mechanical increase in the effective demand for international protection addressed to France.
“In a more structural way, it is the foundations of the current asylum system that deserve to be re-examined,” defends Nicolas Pouvreau-Monti. The Geneva Convention of 1951 and its corollary, the New York Protocol of 1967, are absolutely no longer adapted to the scale of contemporary migratory phenomena. They must be denounced by a political act not subject to appeal by the President of the Republic. Such an initiative would also involve negotiating an “opt-out” on European asylum policy, European law having internalized the provisions of the Geneva Convention. » An approach, if it were initiated by France, which would very quickly be imitated by a number of other European countries, says the Observatory of Immigration and Demography.
