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The Guardian reported that Great Britain’s Labour Party will seek a revision of the international convention on refugees, on the grounds that it predates mass migration and leads to abuse of the asylum system. Immigration Minsiter Phil Woolas said he wanted to start a debate about the 58-year-old convention which protects individuals' rights to asylum from state persecution. French president Nicholas Sarkozy has made a similar proposal. Woolas said:
The Geneva convention was intended to protect individual people from persecution. A significant number of people who claim asylum are doing so for broadly economic reasons. So I think it is right we look at the framework, as indeed other European countries are doing.