ROME - A row is brewing in Italy over whether asylum requests by migrants are justified after Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu said most applications were based on false information or lies.
"We must be clear about the fact that a huge majority of those who secretly enter our territory disappear and end up taking up black-market jobs," Pisanu said Tuesday.
"Ninety-two percent of asylum requests made by immigrants arriving in our country are found to be wrong or false," he added without giving more details.
His statement caused protests among help groups that assist refugees.
"In 2004, 3,131 asylum seekers received assistance in Italy (...), which is more than half the number of decisions made by the government commission concerning applicants," the head of the Italian refugee council (CIR), Christopher Hein, said in a statement.
People from Eritrea, Iraq, Liberia, Nigeria, Romania, Serbia, Somalia, Sudan and Turkey, "almost all countries hit by serious internal conflicts or where human rights are violated," made up the bulk of cases looked into last year, he said.
Lately, Italy which had a long history of emigration has repeatedly expelled groups of would-be immigrants to Libya, across the Mediterranean, following an agreement with Tripoli whose contents was never made public.
The European Court of Human Rights asked the center-right government in Rome earlier this month to stay the expulsion of 11 migrants to Libya and provide more details on reception and identification procedures in the case.
The European Parliament last month also asked Italy to stop the collective expulsion of asylum seekers and "irregular migrants" to Libya, expressing concern that people were being detained in appalling conditions in the north African country.
05/25/2005 14:39 GMT