Syria should not be automatically considered a “safe place”, the Irish Refugee Council (IRC) has said, following a Department of Justice decision to pause asylum applications made by Syrian nationals seeking international protection in Ireland.
More than 140 Syrian people have contacted the IRC seeking information about the pause since the ousting of president Bashar al-Assad, according to chief executive Nick Henderson.
It comes as the Department of Justice confirmed the International Protection Office (IPO) would “temporarily pause the issuing of final determinations while the situation in Syria is kept under review”.
Many Syrians cite oppression under the Assad regime as a reason for their asylum application, with several European countries now pausing applications until further notice after the former ruler fled to Russia following the seizure of the capital of Damascus by rebels following a 13-year-long civil war.
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Minister for Justice Helen McEntee is due to discuss asylum applications for Syrians at a meeting of EU justice and home affairs ministers on Thursday, according to the department.
Mr Henderson said that “if and when” decision-making resumes, Syria should not be automatically be considered a safe place, “just because of the downfall of the Assad regime, given the extremely fluid security situation”.
[ Checkpoints and guard posts burned or abandoned on the road into SyriaOpens in new window ]
“We would also encourage Ireland to contribute positively and progressively to the EU policy debate on this issue, including reconstruction in Syria.
“Less than two days after Assad’s downfall, several EU member states are rushing to deport and return Syrian people and are using disturbing rhetoric, which is completely inappropriate,” he said.
The UK, France, Italy, Greece and Germany, which hosts more than 850,000 Syrians, the highest number in Europe, have also announced a pause on applications.
Austria’s interior minister, Gerhard Karner, meanwhile, instructed his ministry to prepare an “orderly return and deportation program to Syria”.
Since 2011, more than 14 million Syrians have been displaced, including more than 7.2 million internally, according to the UN. About 5.5 million Syrian refugees live in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt.
In 2022, the number of people born in Syria who were living in Ireland had increased by more than four times to 3,922 since 2016, according to the latest census from the Central Statistics Office.
Some 443 Syrians were accommodated by International Protection Accommodation Services in the week leading to December 1st, according to the latest data available from the Department of Integration.
Mr Henderson questioned the legal device used by the IPO in pausing applications, saying the IRC has previously requested that international protection applicants without State-provided accommodation be allowed to pause their protection application while homeless.
“But we were told by the IPO that the International Protection Act 2015 does not allow for this.
“If such a device does exist, and applications are being paused, we recommend the IPO communicate with the approximately 450 Syrian people in our protection process and give a time frame and a process,” he said, adding that the pause should not affect permission-to-work applications.
“It is also worth noting that, up until now, Syria is one of the seven countries which is prioritised by the IPO on the grounds that an application is likely to be well founded,” he said.
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