E-services developed for representatives and attorneys of asylum seekers

The Finnish Immigration Service is currently developing an e-service for the legal counsels and representatives of asylum seekers.

At the moment, documents are sent between counsels, representatives and the agency by encrypted e-mail, letter and fax. In the future, the e-service will make the exchange of documents faster and improve data security.

The following functionalities have been planned for the finished version of the service:

• counsels and representatives can
  • see the processing stage of the application
  • send additional information to the agency
  • request documents from the agency
• the Finnish Immigration Service can
  • request additional information from the counsel or representative
  • inform the counsel or representative of the summons to the asylum interview
  • send other additional information or notifications to the counsel or representative

At the same time, we aim to offer a new customer service channel for the asylum seekers themselves even though the service can only be used by their representatives and attorneys. Customer service for asylum seekers is always challenging because of the confidentiality of the matters being handled. For example, we cannot give out any information on the phone regarding matters on the processing of an asylum seeker’s application because we cannot reliably confirm the caller’s identity.

We are trying to improve the situation with the e-service: until now, asylum seekers have not had any kind of access to e-services.

Our aim is to have a pilot group test the service during the spring and have the service available for everyone at the beginning of autumn 2018. The development of the service will also continue after this.

Asylum process is still being developed – aim is to shorten processing times

At the same time, we are continuously developing the processing of asylum applications.

Besides the daily development, development work has also been done, for example in the Flow project which started in 2016. As a result of this project we, among other things, changed the asylum interview model and developed our data system to better correspond to the requirements of the asylum process.

The work still continues. An extension project was launched in August 2017 to further develop e-tools but also to clarify means with which the authorities involved in the asylum process can investigate the identity and background information of the asylum seekers.

The development work speeds up and facilitates the work of the authorities, but the basic aim of all work is to offer better service than before to our customers: when the processing of applications speeds up, the processing times shorten.

The Flow2 project (1 August 2017–31 January 2019) and the AsylE-Service project (1 October 2017–31 December 2018) receive EU funding from the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF).

Further information for the media

• Flow2 project:
  Laura Cupic, Project Manager, Asylum Unit, tel. + 358 295 430 431, e-mail: firstname.lastname@migri.fi
• AsylE-Service project:
  Alli Tynjälä, Project Manager, Asylum Unit, tel. +358 295 430 431, e-mail: firstname.lastname@migri.fi