Plans to return refugees to 'holding areas' in Eastern Europe

British ministers have hatched a controversial scheme for establishing refugee "protection areas" in Ukraine, the Balkans and other areas to stem the movement of asylum-seekers to the West.

Details of the plan, which could revolutionise the way the EU deals with its asylum problems, are to be discussed next week with the UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR), Ruud Lubbers, who will arrive in London on Monday.

Although EU officials have not been consulted, they say that as long as the scheme was acceptable to the UNHCR it could win backing from countries such as France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece.

The scheme, presented to ministers at a meeting of the cabinet sub-committee on migration, suggests a range of UN-run protection areas, including inside Russia, Morocco and northern Somalia. It proposes that a safe haven should be created in either Turkey, Iran or Iraqi Kurdistan to cope with refugees from Iraq.

The plan would mean that asylum-seekers who reached Britain – or other European Union states – would face being moved back to the protection areas to have their claims considered there. Such a process, the document says, would "rapidly reduce the number of economic immigrants using asylum applications as a migration route" and would deter "potential terrorists".

Refugees would remain in the protection areas for six months. If conditions in their home countries had not then sufficiently stabilised, Britain and other EU countries would accept quotas of migrants.

EU officials argued that the proposals built on earlier thinking about the establishment of safe havens. "Nobody is shocked by this," said one. Brussels has been trying to forge a common approach among the 15 EU member states to manage population flows.

But British immigration lawyers fear the programme aims to put refugees "out of sight and out of mind". David Burgess, of London solicitors Winstanley Burgess, said: "One suspects that it is about creating something where people can be corralled with limited rights and limited opportunities; something very far short of a safe haven." The charity Refugee Action said it was concerned the protection areas might be under-resourced.

The UNHCR said it could not comment without seeing the detail of any British proposal.

Tony Blair's official spokesman played down the significance of the leaked plan. "At this stage no decisions have been taken about how or whether it would be taken forward," he said.