Government plans to give gardai tough powers to speed up the deportation of hundreds of failed asylum-seekers have been criticised as heavy handed by the Irish Refugee Council.
Amendments to legislation debated in the Dail yesterday would increase the powers of gardai to detain asylum-seekers who are due to be deported because their applications for refugee status had failed. Gardai would be able to detain them if they suspected they intended to avoid deportation.
Currently, gardai can detain failed asylum-seekers pending deportation only if they suspect they had not complied with a deportation order.
The council, an umbrella group of refugee organisations, says the amendments would mean that asylum-seekers could be detained immediately once a deportation order was made, without a warrant or the chance to appear before a court.
The council's legal officer, Ms Sara MacNeice, said the amendments were a "stringent tightening" of the rights of unsuccessful asylum-seekers to access to the courts.
"This proposal is heavy handed and will severely limit people's access to legal representation if they wanted to seek leave to judicially review the deportation order," she added.
Ms MacNeice also deplored the manner in which the Government introduced the proposed amendments at short notice prior to yesterday's Dail debate.
"This has taken place without any opportunity for human rights groups to make comments on the proposed amendments which, if implemented, will have a serious impact on the rights of unsuccessful asylum-seekers," she said.
The council wants the Government to return the proposed amendments to a parliamentary committee where human rights groups could be consulted on them.
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties said the proposed amendment "constitutes indefinite preventive detention and marks a new low in the security obsession of the Department of Justice's approach to the whole question of asylum and immigration."
Its director, Mr Donncha O'Connell, said the legislation had become the "dumping ground of every draconian afterthought" of the Minister for Justice.