ABSTRACT
As the end of the 20th century draws near, individual nation states find themselves in a very different context of asylum seeking from that of the middle years of the century, when important international conventions and agreements on asylum were developed. Probably the most important of these is the 1951 Geneva Convention, under which the United Kingdom government has a legal obligation to protect refugees. In the early 1950s the main image held of asylum seekers was of white Europeans emerging from the destruction of the Second World War. Today, there are rising numbers of refugees and asylum seekers across the globe. In 1994 there were 27,000,000 refugees globally, and 496,200 asylum applications to Western Europe and North America alone. 2 Since the 1950s, improvements in global communications, and changes in geopolitical circumstances, have led to a rise in asylum applications from around the world (the “new asylum seekers” from Asia, the Middle East and Africa). In general, the response of the developed world has been to tighten asylum procedures in order to reduce the number of successful 35claims. 3
