Getting political asylum in Finland is more difficult than in Sweden, Norway, or Denmark. Last year nearly half of all asylum applicants in Finland had their applications rejected.

   

In spite of a smaller number of applications compared with the other Nordic Countries, Finland has the longest processing times for asylum applications.

In Denmark an asylum seeker

can get a response in about four months, while the average applicant in Finland might have to wait for well over a year - in spite of the fact that the number of applicants in Finland was less than 2,000 last year, compared with more than 20,000 for Sweden.

   

Jussi Ilvesmäki, administrative chief of the Directorate of Immigration (UVI), admits that the processing time of asylum applications is embarrassingly long in Finland. He blames the situation on the fact that the processing of applications involves many different officials.

   

Last year an experiment began in which responsibility for some asylum interviews was moved from the police to UVI. Ilvesmäki hopes that by 2004 the UVI will deal with all such interviews.

   

"At the turn of the millennium we got more resources, but some went into dismantling the rush of citizenship applications. For instance there is no such problem in Norway because the office there is much larger", Ilvesmäki says.

   

Issues involving asylum-seekers take up between five and ten percent of the work of the Directorate of Immigration.