The Office of the Ombudsman has presented the report “Asylum in Spain: international protection and the resources of the intake system” to the lower house of the Spanish Parliament. The report analyses the situation of the Spanish asylum system and makes 26 recommendations for improving the system of intake and integration of people seeking refuge in Spain.
The recommendations, which were addressed to the Interior Ministry, the Directorate General for Interior Policy, the Department of Immigration and Emigration and the Autonomous Regional Communities, set out to “establish a system for monitoring the procedure and intake, to detect problems in the daily functioning problems and propose measures for improvement”.
In the introduction to the report, the Ombudsman, Soledad Becerril, highlights the problems with regard to asylum that are confronting Spain and Europe as a whole.
She points out that the European Union had never had to “think up and design a policy for receiving hundreds of thousands of people, displaced by war, terror and persecution (…) It was not prepared for that”.
The number of people forcibly displaced “has swamped the capacity of the usual entry procedures”, she adds.
The Ombudsman considers that the humanitarian intake and integration of these people are two fundamental aspects which should be taken into account by the EU and Spain alike.
Intake calls for acting according to a common asylum system, speeding up procedures for applications and transfers to Spain, and tackling with special diligence situations involving minors, people with disability and trafficking in human beings.
It is also necessary to have the right legal assistance and highly qualified healthcare workers for all these functions.
To facilitate integration, the Ombudsman emphasizes that it is necessary to keep watch over both the economic aid that the refugees receive and the different phases in the process that they may go through.
Consequently, the Office of the Ombudsman felt that it was appropriate to review the conditions and circumstances provided for in the law governing the right to asylum and subsidiary protection, of October 2009, to grant protection and endeavour to get the refugees to integrate. That is the purpose of this study.
The figures on re-locations and re-settlements in Spain included in the report are the official figures as at 30 June 2016.
According to Interior Ministry figures, as of 12 July, the figures are:
Total re-locations 197
From Italy 50
From Greece 147
Total re-settlements 118
From Turkey 57
From the Lebanon 61
Download the study here (esp)
