Jan Shaw is the Refugee Programme Director at Amnesty International UK and author of 'Down and Out in London: The Road to Destitution for rejected asylum seekers'.

In January 2006 I attended a meeting about destitute refused asylum seekers. Although no one could put an exact figure as to how many people there were in this situation we knew that it involved hundreds of thousands, a life of abject poverty, living a hand to mouth existence on the charity of others.

During the first six months of last year, I carried out research on the affects of such destitution on refused asylum seekers from Iraq, Iran, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Eritrea and Sudan.  All of them were destitute, at the end of the asylum process and all expressed a fear of returning home.  They faced the prospect of living in poverty indefinitely, or until their departure to their country of origin was enforced as none of them would return voluntarily.

http://refugeecouncil.typepad.com/stillhuman/2007/09/what-should-we-.html