Safeguards for refugees under threat: UN

"Core elements of refugee status ... are being questioned. More and more, asylum seekers are portrayed not as refugees fleeing persecution and entitled to sanctuary, but rather as illegal migrants, potential terrorists and criminals -- or at a minimum, as bogus'," a report by UN refugee agency UNHCR said.

Basic principles underpinning international protection of refugees "have come under increasing threat," the report said.

"In a world which has grown increasingly hostile to asylum and refugees," the very relevance of the UN convention on refugees had been questioned, it said.

The report said there was a tendency to criminalize migrants, including asylum seekers, by associating them with people smugglers and traffickers.

States were responsible for controlling their borders, but they remained "obliged to provide basic safety and assistance to those deemed in need of international protection," it said.

Following the September 11 attacks, states had increasingly invoked security concerns to justify new laws that affected asylum seekers and refugees, the report said.

Border controls had been tightened in many parts of the world, while the grounds for the detention and expulsion of foreign nationals had been broadened, it said.

The report conceded that "it would be naive to believe that terrorists have ignored the opportunity to consider how (asylum) systems might be exploited."

But it said asylum seekers were closely scrutinized and this did not seem the most promising way for a terrorist to enter a country undetected.

The report on "The State of the World's Refugees" said there had been a sharp drop in the worldwide number of refugees and asylum seekers over the past five years.

The number of refugees -- 9.2 million at the start of 2005 -- was down from nearly 18 million in 1992 and was the lowest in 25 years, the report said.

This was mainly due to a drop in armed conflicts and several large-scale repatriations. More than 4 million people had gone home to Afghanistan in recent years and hundreds of thousands more to Angola, Sierra Leone, Burundi and Liberia, it said.

Even so, there are still millions of refugees for whom no solutions are in sight, the report said, citing 33 groups of at least 25,000 refugees in exile for five years or more.