Rethinking commonality in refugee status determination in Europe: Legal geographies of asylum appeals (original) (raw)
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Erdkunde, 2019
Research on the governance of refugees has until recently remained conceptualized with the national perspective as a starting point. This article compares asylum governance at the local level between Germany, Luxembourg and the Neth-erlands, focusing on the often sensitive and highly debated issue of reception and accommodation. The central idea is to determine convergences and divergences of local reception structures and efforts, and how they are linked to the governance levels situated above them. Despite municipalities having been greatly affected by, and having shaped in practice, reception and integration processes of asylum seekers and refugees, so far there has been little in terms of comparative research across countries in Europe. Our findings emerging from the comparison suggest that top-down implementations of asylum reception have created numerous problems and protest on the ground, especially when the local population and local stakeholders were not involved in the decision-making process. On the one hand, the case studies show that within each national setting, the local regimes and agencies can shape divergent reception outcomes in terms of integrative or disintegrative policies. On the other hand, converging developments in the local cases across national contexts, such as the impact of the local political climate, suggest the crucial impact of local reception regimes and agencies, notwithstanding varying regulatory frameworks and procedures. We thus underline the importance of local-to-local comparison, and not only national-to-national, when it comes to analysing refugee reception.
Courting Access to Asylum in Europe: Recent Supranational Jurisprudence Explored
Human Rights Law Review, 2012
This article explores access to refugee protection, which in practice means access to a place of refuge, in light of various barriers to protection erected by European States. First, European States increasingly extend their border controls beyond their territorial borders and cooperate in order to prevent those seeking protection from reaching their territory. Yet, legal obligations, in particular the principle of non-refoulement, may continue to apply to these activities, as the concept of 'jurisdiction' in human rights law develops. Second, they engage a further, diametrically opposed move, where they purport to act as a single zone of protection, and allocate responsibility for asylum claimants in a manner that also hinders access to protection. The aim of this article is to explore the recent responses of Europe's two supranational courts, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR or 'Strasbourg') and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU or 'Luxembourg'), in confronting these attempts to limit and manage access to protection in the EU. Its focus is the ECtHR ruling in Hirsi Jamaa v Italy (condemning Italy's pushback of migrants intercepted on boats in the Mediterranean to Libya), as well as that in MSS v Belgium and Greece (concerning the Dublin system for allocation of responsibility for processing asylum claims) and the subsequent CJEU ruling in NS/ME.
Refugee Protection in Europe and Beyond – Comparative Report
Global Migration: Responses and Consequences, 2020
This comparative report is based on the RESPOND country reports [deliverable D3.1] that discusses the developments regarding legislation, policy measures and practices on refugee protection, but most importantly the implementation aspect in ten countries covered by the project (Austria, Germany, Greece, Iraq, Italy, Lebanon, Poland, Sweden, Turkey and the United Kingdom) for the 2011-2019 period. This report aims to provide a comparative analysis of refugee protection, emphasising the implementation aspect as drawn from the experiences and perceptions of meso and micro level actors. In doing so, the report offers analytical insights for evaluating the implications of the dynamics of refugee protection, which has undergone many changes since 2011. Despite the largely shared regional, international and supranational obligations regarding refugee protection, the overarching pattern in the field of refugee protection is characterised by a restrictive approach. Although some countries were relatively more welcoming at the beginning Syrian displacement in 2011, such as Turkey (open-doors policy) and Lebanon, restricted access to national/federal territories, additional physical measures such as security walls and other actions such as push backs have become common, hindering the asylum procedure, particularly after 2015. Many countries have introduced additional procedural measures to prevent and restrain access to international protection as well as to speed up asylum assessments, such as accelerated procedures, fast-track-procedures, border procedures. Increased rejections and long waiting periods have become policies in themselves. Almost all countries tended to downgrade the rights of applicants and beneficiaries of protection. In general, all newly introduced amendments or regulations impose new restrictions or limitations to existing standards of rights. However, at the same time, some countries developed policies and practices to respond to the humanitarian crisis and welcomed refugees only from certain nationalities on the grounds of humanitarian or national reasons, through residence permits and family reunification. As for the RESPOND countries who are EU Member States, the observance of the so-called minimum EU-level standards, or even lower, has become common. All countries display an extremely complex and continually changing legal framework on refugee protection. The newly introduced additional procedures result in the fragmentation of the examination of claims through the categorisation of asylum seekers. This also resulted in stratified legal statuses with different procedures and specified rights, adding up to the traceable nationality-based discrimination against certain asylum seekers (e.g. Afghans), creating ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ migrants/refugees.
The Global Reach of European Refugee Law (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
This book explores the extent to which European legal norms of refugee protection have been emulated in other parts of the world, identifies the processes through which this is happening, and assesses the implications of these trends. It aims to contribute to the debates on the diffusion of law and the role of the EU as a normative power
Understanding Refugee Law in an Enlarged European Union Theory
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2003
The present article seeks to explore how asylum law is formed, transformed and reformed in Europe, what its effects are on state practice and refugee protection in the Baltic and Central European candidate countries, and what this process reveals about the framework used by scholars to understand the dynamics of international refugee law. Arguably, an exclusive focus on EU institutions and their dissemination of regional and international norms among candidate countries through the acquis communitaire is misleading. Looking at the subregional interplay between Vienna and Budapest, Berlin and Warsaw, Copenhagen and Vilnius provides a richer understanding of the emergence of norms than the standard narrative of a Brussels dictate. Hence, to capture these dynamics, we will attempt to expand the framework of analysis by incorporating sub-regional settings, cutting across the divide between old and new Members, and by analysing the repercussions sent out by domestic legislation within these settings. While acknowledging that bilateral and multilateral relations are continuously interwoven, we conclude that bilateralism accounts for a greater degree of normative development and proliferation than multilateralism at EU level, and that domestic legislation as formed by sub-regional dynamics will remain the ultimate object of study for scholars of international refugee law. In the following, reference to the 1951 Convention covers the Convention as modified by the Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees, 31 Jan. 1967, 606 UNTS 267. 2 See e.g. Simpson, 'Asylum and Immigration in the European Union After the Treaty of Amsterdam', 5
The Global Reach of European Refugee Law
2013
Europe has the most advanced regional protection regime in the world. The predicted impact of this body of norms, including the new Common European Asylum System, has been widely identified as one that will have a 'ripple effect' beyond the EU. However, very few studies have noted the fact that this regime has already influenced the law and practice of States around the world, for some time. The purpose of this book is to gather evidence that emulation is happening (if it is), to explore the extent and identify the processes through which it is happening, and to examine the implications of these findings. Of the seven case studies examined here, all but one reveal clear evidence of emulation at some point in time. The EU protection regime, which has been most influenced by the European Court of Human Rights, is 'naturally' evolving transnationally and spreading internationally. hélène lambert is Professor of International Law, University of Westminster, London, where she teaches refugee law, human rights law and EU law. She has been a regular consultant for the Council of Europe and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR); she also served briefly as a Protection Officer for UNHCR (1996). She has written extensively on asylum, refugees and human rights. jane m c ad am is Scientia Professor of Law and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, University of New South Wales, Australia. She is also Director of the International Refugee and Migration Law project at the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law. She has undertaken consultancies for UNHCR and a number of governments on forced migration issues. maryel le n f ulle rto n is Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, New York. She has been selected twice as a Fulbright Scholar, most recently serving as the Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Trento, Italy. In addition to publishing numerous academic works on refugee and migration law, she served as a reporter for Human Rights Watch and headed several human rights missions in Germany.
International Migration 57(1), 229-244, 2019
The Asylum Procedures Directive, which was put in place in the context of the Common European Asylum System, is expected both to harmonise asylum procedures in the European Union and to safeguard applicants’ rights. This article explores various steps in the implementation of the directive, starting with transnational negotiations which aim to influence domestic asylum policies. Focusing on the asylum systems in Germany and Sweden, the article shows that the way decision makers implement the directive is shaped by diverging domestic asylum policies. The risk of failing common standards, however, is not only a matter of implementation, but inherent in the directive’s design. Furthermore, harmonisation does not necessarily improve compliance with the principles of international refugee law. Safeguarding protection seekers’ rights requires rethinking both asylum legislation and the role of the actors who intervene in its implementation.
The Europeanization of Asylum Policy: From Sovereignty via Harmony to Unity
To what extent do asylum decisions within the EU amount to an EU asylum policy? The paper tackles the question within a simplified and amended framework recommended by Lasswell and McDougal's policy analysis (the amendment is that the postulation of basic public order goals has three interrelated functions: the explication of evaluative assumptions entertained by a policy analyst; the articulation, appraisal, revision and ordering of the assumptions, which result in a prescription of public order goals; the identification and ordering, from among a potentially endless flow of empirical data, of those decisions that conform to the postulated goals). The principal postulated goal is human dignity or a free society. Subordinate goals include the right to life, the right to freedom, the rule of law, and solidarity. The analysis of tendencies in decision, although exhaustive, does not suffice to give an unequivocal answer to the principal question. A major reason is a discrepancy between the EU treaties and directives on asylum, which allegedly are the basic and the implementing EU instruments respectively. However, it is apparent that minimum standards are an insufficient incentive for the proper harmonisation of national asylum systems, and leave a too high level of discretion to the member states regarding the transposition of the legal acquis into national systems. The Europeanization of asylum policy has not been inspired by humanitarian considerations, but by policies of the member states to discourage and prevent asylum seekers to access state territories on the one hand, and to promptly and efficiently process asylum applications on the other. European institutions will probably keep putting efforts into the building of the Common Asylum System and harmonisation of national asylum systems, particularly in the direction of the establishment of a single procedure and uniform refugee status at the level of the entire Union. However, the question