Zimbabweans

The Archbishop of Canterbury was right yesterday to declare that the "deeply unsatisfactory" nature of our asylum system is not restricted to the way it handles Zimbabwe. Indeed it is not, but Zimbabwe is the most urgent of the system's numerous shortcomings. Ministers insisting that deportations to Zimbabwe of failed asylum seekers must continue. Yet within the last four weeks more than 250,000 Zimbabwean citizens have been made homeless by President Robert Mugabe's ruthless bulldozing of entire neighbourhoods. In the words of the Archbishop of Bulawayo, Pius Ncube, the president is following a Pol Pot "peasantification" policy, under which opposition supporters living on the edge of towns are being driven back into the countryside even though there are no crops there to support them.

Britain's hardline deportation policy - which Dr Williams describes as "deeply immoral" - was defended this week by both the prime minister and the home secretary on the grounds that a blanket ban would send a signal which would encourage more Zimbabweans to try and reach the UK. The facts suggest otherwise. Until November 2004 there was a ban on deportations to Zimbabwe for two years. Far from increasing the flow of asylum seekers, the numbers dropped by more than a third from 3,295 in 2003 to 2050 in 2004. It is not deportations that deter Zimbabweans coming to Britain, but the Catch-22 immigration system that was introduced in November 2002: no one can come to Britain without a visa, but no one can get a visa if they are intending to claim asylum.

Even more immoral than the deportations are ministerial justifications. The first of these is that there have been "no substantial reports" of abuse of those who have been returned. This is disputed by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), by local churches and by Amnesty International. The second is that people are only being sent back where there are clear grounds. Wrong again. But for the intervention of Kate Hoey MP, Crispen Kulinji, an MDC member who fled after being tortured, would have been deported last Saturday.

There are currently more than 100 Zimbabwean failed asylum seekers in detention awaiting deportation, over half of whom are on hunger strike. Some are already on their seventh day. It is time to reintroduce a deportation ban and allow existing failed asylum seekers a temporary right to remain. For most of them, Dr Williams's warning applies. The risks of sending them back under existing conditions are just too unacceptably high.