Northern Ireland could face "dangerous times" if an adequate system to deal with the growing number of asylum applications is not rapidly put in place, a human rights lawyer has warned.
Not even the Immigration Office, the government authority dealing with asylum-seekers in Belfast, appears to have exact numbers on the rate of asylum applications.
But in a letter to the North's Law Centre, the Chief Immigration Officer recently confirmed he had dealt with almost 400 cases in 1998, half of which were asylum applications.
The Law Centre estimates that a further 200 to 300 asylum-seekers a year live in Northern Ireland while their cases are being dealt with elsewhere in Britain.
Legal experts are concerned that last year more than 85 people were detained in jail while their cases were processed, a rate described as "disturbingly high" by the Law Centre.
"These figures provide a worrying glimpse of the disproportionate extent to which detention is a method of enforcing immigration control in Northern Ireland," says Ms Ellen Weaver from the Law Centre's Derry office.
As there are no clear criteria as to who is to be detained, the decision is left to the discretion of individual immigration officers. Since there are no purpose-built detention centres, asylum-seekers are held at high security prisons at Maghaberry (female) and Magilligan (male). "There is a problem for us advocates here. If we argue for proper detention centres, our fear is that the government would detain even more people in them," says Dr Colin Harvey, a lecturer at the Centre for International and Comparative Human Rights Law at Queen's University Belfast.
Advocates are extremely concerned at the conditions in Magilligan, located some 70 miles from Belfast, where refugees are held alongside convicted criminals and sex offenders, rather than with remand prisoners as stipulated by various UN agencies.
"The situation at Magilligan is particularly unacceptable. Detainees cannot receive incoming phone-calls, visits by relatives are difficult due to the distance and there is a lack of access to interpreters and other facilities. Moreover, there have been reports of racist assaults and bullying by other inmates. We note that this is not the Prison Service's fault. They simply have no multi-cultural training," Ms Weaver says.
Dr Harvey says it is an "incredibly dangerous stage in the asylum debate. The consequences of not dealing with the situation could be terrible, as we have seen in other European countries. Sweeping the problem under the carpet is the first step towards letting it get out of hand."