Speech #970030415

N.Y. DEAR MR. GOLLOBIN: We should like to acknowledge receipt of your letter of November 28. 1979 requesting UNHCR to testify in Haitian Refugee Center et al. v. Civiletti. As explained to you earlier. it is not possible for officials of this office to be formally involved in domestic litigation in view of the legal status of the United Nations and its immunity under the relevant international Conventions and national legislation. Accordingly. it would not be possible for officials of this office to testify or to submit a formal Affidavit in this matter. However. you have referred in your letter to several specific questions referring to the role of UNHCR in reviewing Haitian asylum cases in Florida. In this connection I would like to offer your comments. Firstly. UNHCR has been invited by the State Department to give advisory opinions on asylum applications of Haitian nationals. In accordance with this request and in exercise of UNHCRs legal mandate (especially article 2. paragraphs 1 and 2 of the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees) this office has reviewed applications for asylum by Haitians on a casebycase basis. We have at times informally and on request offered our comments on issues relating to the processing of asylum applications such as the improvement of INS Ayslum application form (1589). However. it has been the policy of this office not to comment on the adequacy of the domestic procedures in general or on the question of whether Haitian asylum applicants were accorded full due process and equal protection rights under domestic legislation. Secondly. you refer to a statement asserting that UNHCR "independently reviewed and evaluated" the processing of Haitians asylum applications in Miami. This appears to be incorrect as our office has never made such an evaluation. although staff members of UNHCR. including myself. have observed the procedures in the INS district office in Miami on several occasions with the knowledge of INS personnel. We have never concluded that "generally" the mass of Haitians seeking asylum were economic refugees and that their claims to political asylum were not bona fide. Reviews by our office have been made on a casebycase basis which relied exclusively on information submitted to us by INS through the Department of State. It is not the policy of this office to render such conclusions as referred to. As you know. we have rendered advisory opinions on a considerable number of these individual cases in 1977 and again as of fall While we have only been in a position to recommend the granting of asylum in a limited number of cases. this is in part because many of the applications were incomplete or contained no information at all on the subject matter related to asylum. In all cases. the review of asylum requests by this office was made on the basis of information which INS had submitted to the Department of State for this purpose. In many of the 1589 forms "request for asylum in the United States". the space for answers to questions was frequently left blank. In other instances. the answers referred to documents which were not made available to us.