France: a new law on immigration and right to political asylum. Associations, “it makes no improvement”

“This new reform of the asylum law does not make any improvement on the time it takes to register and have access to rights”. The comment of CFDA (a Coordination that brings together a number of French associations for asylum rights, from Cimade to Acat and Amnesty International) about the new law submitted by the Government today for “controlled immigration and an effective right to political asylum” is very blunt. In a release, CFDA points out that “the so-called migrant crisis is not the cause of the many inconveniences shown by the asylum procedure. Such inconveniences are due to the failures of the administrative and emergency management procedures, which have made the procedural and homing systems more obscure and abstruse”. The new reform “multiplies the tricks that deter from applying” and “mainly focuses on speeding up the time it takes to process asylum applications at OFPRA and CNDA, already remarkably shortened by the 2015 reform”. However – the associations point out –, such shortened deadlines are “detrimental to applicants, because of the short time the Agency’s staff spend on each file”. In France, applications for asylum first go through the French Department for the protection of refugees and stateless persons (Ofpra); if an application is rejected, the applicant can file an appeal. At that point, the National Court of Asylum (Cnda, a body of the Council of State) opens a file. The changed timeline means that CNDA and OFPRA will have to reply to an application in under six months. The problem is that nowadays a judge already handles 325 cases a year, an assumedly very high number.