Asylum-seeker charities ‘playing the system’

Immigration minister Phil Woolas has attacked lawyers and charities working on behalf of asylum seekers, accusing them of undermining the law and ‘playing the system’. Woolas described the legal professionals and NGO workers as ‘an industry’, and said most asylum seekers were not fleeing persecution but were economic migrants. ‘The system is played by migration lawyers and NGOs to the nth degree,’ Woolas said. ‘By giving false hope and by undermining the legal system, they cause more harm than they do good.’ But Sophie Brown, chair of the Immigration Law Practitioners Association, said: ‘Lawyers can only work with the law. To say they are undermining the law is an extraordinary comment to make.’