Her eyes are wide, and she doesn't say a word, but looks at me from across the wooden desk in the slightly shabby interviewing area of the Newcastle Refugee Support Centre. 'She's just so scared' says her English friend. I nod. I cannot imagine what her mind's-eye is seeing behind that desperate look, but for a girl younger than me who's fled from war-torn Sudan it is probably a confused nightmare. The lady next to her is her neighbour in Newcastle, and deeply concerned for her young friend. Which is the reaction one would expect from a compassionate human being, and I have to bite my lip and grimace as I see them sitting there, and know that the only thing I can say is ' I'll try and phone the solicitor again this afternoon. Sorry.' For compassion, though we in the minority world seem to flaunt our society as one of freedom, respect and humane values, has discovered an insurmountable barrier in the intricacies of British Asylum policy and administration, between those destitute on the ground and those creating the policy far away at the end of a hundred telephone lines and long-winded application forms. For Yamimma the right to safety, promised to her in the Geneva Convention on Human Rights, is on the other side of an English judicial process which a few weeks ago denied her claim and now destines her to be returned, homeless and with no family, to Sudan.

She would like to appeal. She is from the more dangerous south of Sudan, and the Home Office does not recognise the difference between south and north in terms of the risk for a returned asylum seeker (even if she is barely 20 and female). But no solicitor will take her on, because they are all overloaded, and 'Sudan' does not promise an 'easy case' because 'the war is over now'. Yamimma thus fulfils our media and legal definition of an illegal, bogus asylum seeker. It is not the first time today that it occurs to me how easy it is to create illegal asylum seekers, without them having to do anything at all other than be unlucky and have the impertinence to follow their human instinct for a life free from terror. Just label their claim as 'unfounded' and hey presto, they are bogus.

The fundamental issue, I suppose, is how you see other people. Are they people, in fact, or are they only potential people? Having seen so many of these faces and heard their stories, I find it hard to stomach the cold blooded discussion of asylum seekers found, for example, on the Home Office website. In the last few years, Britain has been toughening up. The language used by our government indicates the level of undesirability of refugees. Fundamentally, they tell us, we need to keep numbers down as much as possible. Unfortunately, this does not quite slot in smoothly with things like the UN Convention on Human Rights, which binds us to accepting genuine refugees. In short, the numbers of refugees fleeing their countries cannot be altered by reducing the numbers we will allow into the UK. But the numbers we are prepared to take in are more under our control; if only this Human Rights business could be ignored, we wouldn't have to take any at all. So we will distinguish between genuine refugees and others, and call the others abusers of the system, like Yamimma.

When David Blunkett says ' …the tough measures the Government has put in place to prevent illegal immigration and tackle abuse of the asylum system are working. […] The notion that nothing can be done and Government action is failing is clearly proven to be wrong by today's figures' , he elucidates this concept that the solution to asylum seekers is to deem them illegal where possible with a tougher system. When he follows this up with the proud declaration that '[t]he changing situation in Afghanistan, Iraq and Sri Lanka has also played a part and this is reflected elsewhere in Europe. But claims have fallen more than twice as much in the UK than elsewhere in Europe because of our tough measures' he confirms that we are managing to keep people out by the ingenuity of our system, and not because these unlucky people suddenly have less claim to refuge.

Once one has established as a basic premise the idea that asylum seekers are only to be accepted if there is absolutely no way round it, one opens up the entire asylum application system to a very high level of what one might call legal fernickertyness. In the last few weeks I have had the privilege to read several refusals of asylum from the Home Office which in nearly every case run along the following lines: ' We acknowledge that the applicant will face severe medical/ social/ racial/ political difficulties if returned to his/her country of origin. However, none of his/her claims fall under the definition of a right to asylum, namely a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.' What can one say? It is not enough to have a convincing case, these days. The trick is to be lucky, it seems.

And if the possibility of having one's claim to asylum accepted is this arbitrary, it is nothing compared with the possibility of surviving while waiting for the claim to be processed. It is of course illegal to work and earn money. And as of recently, with a new headache called Section 55 in the Asylum system, it is also impossible to receive support if for some reason you did not claim asylum 'within a reasonable time' of arriving in the UK. This time does not seem to be defined, but those affected by Section 55 include people who applied after two days. Now, if you have flown in on a plane, intending to reach the UK, it is reasonably easy to claim asylum immediately, and without a visa you will certainly be informed you must apply (if you are not sent back right away). However if you got into the back of a truck in the north of former Yugoslavia, and got tipped out by the side of the road somewhere else, a few days later, it is fairly likely you will take longer than a day or two to figure out where you are, what you need to do and whom you need to go and see. And if the place you have just fled from has engraved in your head that 'authorities' - particularly the police - mean arrest and torture, you could probably be forgiven for not reporting to a police station on instinct. A nasty shock then, once you have applied, to find yourself destitute, denied food and shelter and in the possession of a letter accusing you of devious intentions and having jeopardised your credibility.

Of course, this is only one scenario, which was true for the 35 men and women from countries including amongst others the Congo, Eritrea, Nigeria and Burundi, who slept rough, fell ill and were harassed outside the Refugee Council in London for weeks this August. But "being Section 55'd" happen to a friend of mine the other week. P, 18 years old, also volunteers for the Refugee Service. His father is from Azerbaijan and his mother Armenian and he grew up mainly in Israel and England. He speaks Russian with his Dad but has never lived in Russia. He speaks Hebrew but does not want to serve in the occupied territories as a matter of conscience, and so would be imprisoned as a 'refuser' if he returned to Israel. He arrived in England at the age of 15 and, as he was a minor, was a 'dependant' on his father, so had no independent claim. Just after his 18th birthday this year his father was refused asylum. So P made a claim himself. He received a letter from the Home Office accusing him of waiting three years before claiming asylum, of claiming not to be Russian yet speaking Russian as his first language, and of thereby deliberately misleading the Home Office. No, they said, we will not give you any support or housing. P is my sister's age. She grew up in Germany so speaks German and English. She has dual citizenship. She is also bright, likeable, the sort of person who would volunteer at a refugee support centre just after they've finished school. But no government expects her to go through the hell this poor kid is experiencing right now, the uncertainty, his distraught father, the sense of powerlessness, capped by the completely unfounded attack on his integrity. And compared with most of the other asylum seekers he spends his mornings helping, he is lucky - educated, young, fit, a good English speaker.

Making support difficult to access is one of the things the Home Office prides itself on, one of the things organisations like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch deride the UK for, and one of the things that make those working in support offices round the country feel like they're banging their head (or should I say, being forced to bang their clients' heads) against a brick wall.

In 1998 the government White Paper 'Fairer, Faster, And Firmer' introduced a voucher system whereby asylum seekers would receive 70% of what is deemed minimum subsistence support for a British citizen, in the form of vouchers which could only be exchanged in certain shops and for which no change could be given. The White Paper explains that this system is far more cumbersome and less efficient to administer than a straight cash based support system, but that the increased difficulty it presents to asylum seekers is a desirable reward for this inefficiency as the support provided cannot be perceived as an incentive to come to the UK and claim asylum . The thinking behind this policy is based on a set of premises along the lines of the following: a) that the chance to receive 70% of the support needed to survive in England, while going through the stress of an asylum application and the humiliation of being forbidden to earn, is a reason for people to risk their lives and make almost impossible journeys to the UK; b) that the number of people trying to abuse the system outweighs the number of people in desperate need both of support and of asylum, so that punishing the 'genuine' applicants is justified in the name of deterring the 'non'-genuine applicants ( including, of course ones like Yamimma or P., described above); c) that the knowledge of how difficult life is in the UK as an asylum seeker will stop people arriving in the UK (it is rare that refugees fleeing a country will have a great amount of choice to where they are going, and inevitable that many will continue to arrive in the UK whatever situation awaits them. Indeed, the largest proportion of the world's displaced people end up either homeless in their own country, or in a neighbouring country, in which they will often find similarly terrible conditions to those from which they fled. This does not stop them arriving there.)

The use of vouchers has recently been stopped, which is a welcome move; however, the level of support remains below the normal subsistence line, and as Amnesty International points out in its response to the most recent government White Paper, 'The basic premise of that policy remains in place - the requirement that asylum seekers should survive on a level of income that is significantly lower than the basic subsistence payment received by UK citizens who are dependent on state support. Amnesty International believes that it is time to abandon this discriminatory practice. '

Assuming that flaws in the judicial system are inevitable, and that the support situation really isn't all that out of line with our duties to needy people, there is still one huge and controversial feature of the British attitude to refugees which I for one still can't get my head round: detention centres. To detain people who have committed no criminal offence is quite indisputably a flagrant violation of their human rights. Even if the only asylum seekers detained in Britain were those, in the words of Beverly Hughes, Minister for Immigration, ' who […] are dishonest about their identity, have failed to abide by the rules or where we want to ensure the return of those who have no right to be here [i.e. those whose claims have been refused]' , that would still constitute a violation of the right to freedom, as none of the above named misdemeanours constitute a criminal offence. However firstly detention, in fact, is arbitrary, in that any person coming from a certain list of countries (including South Africa, Ecuador, Albania and 21 other countries all with considerable numbers of refugees emigrating regularly) is detained upon entry into the UK before they have even made an asylum claim. Secondly, families with children are frequently detained, for which the only justification that can usually be given is a suspicion that they may 'abscond'. Thirdly, because there are not enough places in detention centres for the numbers the Home Office detains, many are kept in prisons where they are placed under exactly the same regime as other prisoner despite having committed no crime, and finally, detained asylum seekers have fewer rights (of appeal etc) than people charged with murder, rape and serious crimes . There is too much literature and criticism from NGOs and legal bodies of this practice, to even begin to explore it here. Suffice to say that Human Rights Watch states that 'the UK proposals [in the most recent White Paper] could undermine the right to seek asylum and the right to be protected against return to an unsafe place' , and that Amnesty International 'urges the Government to review its policy and practice regarding the detention of asylum seekers to comply with international standards' .

Personally, I am exceedingly uncomfortable knowing that the government representing me is acknowledged to be violating the human rights of my fellow human beings. This neither inspires me with confidence regarding the government's credibility on the global stage, nor softens me to their extraordinary logic in maintaining an asylum system questionable in terms both of its legality and of its humanitarian acceptability. Knowing a little of the facts outlined above was enough to awaken this doubt some time ago; working recently with the asylum seekers we are trying to remove has merely transformed disapproval into horror.

Just to finish, I'd like to tell one more story of a Rwandan lady who at the beginning of July this year had her claim denied. The statement made by the judge acknowledged that she would face terrible hardship on her return, as a widow (of the genocide) with three young children, with no home or family and having been seriously beaten and chased out of her house with knives by her husband's family who hold her responsible for failing to prevent his death. The judge also stated that he was greatly concerned that by sending her and her children back, he might be violating the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child by condemning them to the kind of unsafe life they may expect. However, he said, she is an educated woman and he believes she will find employment in Rwanda, and he also believes that as there is no genocide currently reported, she should not be allowed to remain in the UK. She had one month to appeal this decision, and as her case seems so convincing and the reasoning of the judge so odd, many recommended that she appeal. However, it being the summer holidays, all solicitors in the Newcastle area were understaffed and could not take on an extra case until September. I spent a morning phoning solicitors early in September to find one to take her on. Because the appeal date has expired, and because the Home Office did not respond in July to her application for an extension, reflecting the difficulties at this time of year, no-one will take on her case, as battling with the Home Office about the appeal deadline was deemed by all of them too time-consuming. Another illegal immigrant she therefore remains, and is now awaiting deportation.

It makes me ashamed to be British.

For more information, try HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH www.hrw.org, AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL UK www.amnesty.org.uk, HOME OFFICE www.ind.homeoffice.gov.uk, CARD (Cambridgeshire Against Refugee Detention) card.zambezi.org.uk