But it also requires careful analysis.

Last week, the Minister for Justice dismissed the deeply volatile political situation in Afghanistan as "disturbances" and all the other mainstream political parties stayed well clear of the issue. The Christian Churches, while urging the men to leave the cathedral sanctuary, refused to put pressure on them publicly.

The men themselves, mostly through spokesman Osman Hotok, say they fear being tortured if they are sent back to Afghanistan.

This is on the basis of reports they have heard of politically motivated or extra-judicial killings by the government or its agents.

Earlier last week Hotok told reporters: "For example, torture, official and punitive, poor prison conditions, abuse of authority by regional commanders, trafficking in persons and abuse of workers and children. We will remain on hunger strike until somebody could come forward to guarantee us that we will get political asylum or we will die one by one."

In other interviews, references were made in somewhat vague terms to the involvement of the hunger-strikers with the Taliban. Yesterday it emerged that one of the protesters is a nephew of a former cabinet minister in the Taliban government. Sultan Kabir Chakari, a 45-year-old diabetic blind man from Kabul, fears he will be persecuted because he was an official in the foreign ministry under the Taliban.

Leaving aside the teenage boys, who should never have been allowed to hunger strike in the first place, and should be treated as special cases in relation to their asylum applications, there are unanswered questions about other members of the group.

We should not forget that the Taliban presided over a brutal regime of oppression and cruelty in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001. They instituted the Islamic law of Shari'ah, banning all forms of television, imagery, music and sport, which they enforced with savagery. Theft was punished by the amputation of one or both hands, women were stoned for adultery, and death by hanging took place in the central stadium in Kabul with regularity.

This was the regime that harboured Osama bin-Laden and allowed terrorist training camps to spring up in its heartlands. It persecuted and oppressed minority groups, women and anybody who didn't toe the line.

Their insurgency continues to this day. In the past week 105 people died in Taliban attacks.

Outside Kabul, they are largely still in charge.

The reality on the ground is that the democratic values embodied by President Hamid Karzai haven't caught on and in many parts of Afghanistan nothing has changed in the past four years. Despite $12bn in aid and the deaths of 220 US soldiers, many Afghans want the Taliban back to protect Islamic values against the invasion of western ways.

We are justifiably proud of our western values of democracy and freedom. They were hard won and should be cherished and respected by all. The Minister for Justice is right. We cannot collectively deal with asylum seekers.

Each case must be dealt with on an individual basis and, while we should have compassion for their plight, we must not let this cloud judgement based on the facts. We have a duty of protection to the weakest and most vulnerable. But we can't apply that to everybody just because they seek it.