Last week, the Home Office Minister Meg Hillier said on the BBC’s Woman’s Hour programme that the UK Border Agency ensures that very complex cases brought by women asylum seekers do not go through the UK’s so-called “detained fast-track” asylum process, a route designed for straightforward asylum claims that can be decided quickly.

By the end of 2011 UKBA aims to conclude 90% of new asylum cases within six months of application. But it is neither reasonable nor in accordance with the UK's obligations under international refugee law to seek to achieve this target by dint of using an inherently unfair procedure. The correct test of an asylum system is that those in need of protection receive it, not the speed with which they are rejected.

Charity, a Liberian refugee whom I met just after her release from an immigration detention center in Arizona, told me how the United States had rescued her from a refugee camp in Ghana and then, a year later, threw her in jail.

A virus is sweeping Asia. The symptoms are heightened xenophobia and amnesia about fundamental refugee rights.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement arbitrarily detains refugees and holds them indefinitely for failing to meet paperwork requirements.

The Yemeni government should stop systematically arresting Ethiopian asylum seekers and forcibly returning them to Ethiopia. The United Nations refugee agency should do more to press the Yemeni government to meet its obligations toward all asylum seekers and refugees.

Israel's High Court should order an end to the government's policy of forcibly returning to Egypt migrants who enter Israel at the Sinai border without giving them an opportunity to claim asylum.

Burundi's government should immediately reverse a new policy of deporting Rwandan asylum seekers without considering their cases. On November 27, 2009, Interior Minister Edouard Nduwimana ordered police to return 103 asylum seekers to Rwanda, in violation of international law.