Last night at the St Philip’s Centre a People’s Commission on asylum was hosted by Leicester ICLS. Conclusions drawn from 90 minutes of discussion will be fed into a national survey on asylum that the Independent Asylum Commission are compiling in order to review the UK asylum system and make recommendations to the government.

The evening commenced with a thought experiment which placed us in a scenario that allowed us to think more objectively about the asylum system. This also helped us to approach the next activities with a greater degree of thoughtfulness and objectivity.

One of the participants commented at the end that he was surprised there wasn’t more disagreement. We were asked to agree or disagree with 8 statements and pictured are the outcomes – the statements we agreed with, some of them slightly ammended. I think it shows that whilst we can be placed at different points on a political spectrum, and we all have a different attitude to authority, we all accept Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (a bright pink copy from Amnesty International adorns the office wall): ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’, and Article 14: ‘Everyone has the right to seek and enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution’. One participant asked the question ‘where would we go?’

The final task was to talk about language – which word do we want to use to describe asylum seekers? We unanimously agreed that the phrase ’sanctuary seeker’ had a far greater resonance with the protection the UK could offer from the horrors of some of the World’s worst regimes and warzones. For me, the word sanctuary slides in beside the City of Sanctuary movement and conjures up images of the sanctuary of a church, the space near the alter, somewhere sacred.