The international politics of refugee protection (original) (raw)
Related papers
Burden-sharing: the international politics of refugee protection
2006
This article shows that the refugee burdens among Western states are also very unequally distributed and that this constitutes a problem not only for individual states, but also for the EU as whole. It argues that despite many obstacles, the development of regional or international burdensharing regimes is indeed desirable. Attempts to explain or justify steps towards such a system do not have to rely solely on notions of solidarity but can be justified by more traditional interest-based motivations. However, it suggests that the EU’s main burden-sharing initiatives which rely largely on policy harmonisation will not achieve the Union’s objectives in this area. It will be argued that market-based burden-sharing mechanisms need to be explored further and that such market driven policies when combined with policy harmonisation and quota-based initiatives are likely to contribute to a more equitable, efficient and effective refugee burden-sharing system.
Why EU Policy Harmonisation Undermines Refugee Burden-Sharing
2003
Public policy making on asylum takes place in an environment of intense public scrutiny, strong institutional constraints and international collective action problems. By assessing the relative importance of key pull factors of international migration, this article explains why, even when controlling for their differences in size, some states receive a much larger number of asylum seekers than others. The analysis of 20 OECD countries for the period 1985-1999 further shows that some of the most high profile public policy measures—safe third country provisions, dispersal and voucher schemes—aimed, at least in part, at deterring unwanted migration and at addressing the highly unequal distribution of asylum burdens have often been ineffective. This is because the key determinants of an asylum seeker’s choice of host country are historical, economic and reputational factors that largely lie beyond the reach of asylum policy makers. Finally, the paper argues that the effectiveness of uni...
Towards A Common EU Asylum Policy: The Political Economy of Refugee Burden-Sharing
2006
The European Union plays an increasingly influential role in the management of asylum-seekers and refugees in Europe. This paper addresses the question why European states have decided to cooperate in this policy area and why they have been prepared to give EU institutions an increasingly greater role in this process. It seeks to offer new insights into the motivation for international cooperation in this area, analyzing in particular how the EU has sought to address collective action problems that states are faced with when dealing with asylum seekers. EU asylum policies initiatives both before and after 9/11 will be scrutinized and assessed in view of their success in providing an effective and equitable regulatory framework for asylum and refugee policy in Europe.
The discourse surrounding the link between human security and the European Union’s policy on external burden-sharing is connected to the concept of securitisation developed in the 1990s, when the language of human security was first used to promote solutions in the regions-of-origin of refugees through external burden- sharing. External forms of burden-sharing, nevertheless, can be traced back to the UNHCR’s use of its ‘good offices’ in the 1960s to promote ′regional solutions in Asia, and reflect a slow evolution since the adoption of the 1951 Convention. In order to understand this evolution this article adopts an analysis informed by policy mapping of targeted representative cases combined with a comparative approach towards those cases. It proposes for the subject to be addressed from the perspectives of the states; protection seekers; and the balance of refugees’ rights and state security. This article argues that the concept of external burden-sharing is compatible with effective refugee protection and their more rational distribution, but only when it offers long-term solutions based on genuine protection and not as a surrogate to the granting of asylum in the European Union. According to the analysis provided, this article concludes that the current European Union policy on refugee protection is implicitly guided by a restrictive rationalisation of movements as a result of a slow evolution of a distorted and not effectively implemented version of external burden- sharing. First through promoting local solutions and then the human security concept. Yet, this policy cannot represent an acceptable long-term alternative to territorial asylum or an admissible form of external burden-sharing, because protection seekers’ movements are guided by the safety and effectiveness of protection and the current European Union external approach does not offer such protection.
The European Union’s Disintegration over Refugee Responsibility-Sharing
Women Talking Politics, 2019
In 2015 the European Union (EU) was faced with one of its greatest challenges; the arrival of more than one million irregular migrants by boat following the outbreak of the Arab Spring uprisings in various Middle East countries and the subsequent Syrian civil war. The so-called refugee ‘crisis’ was an opportunity for the EU to unite, and to find solutions based upon its founding principle of solidarity. One such attempt was the Emergency Refugee Relocation Schemes, which sought to distribute 160,000 people among member states. However, as of late 2018 only 34,705 had been relocated, with a number of member states refusing to accept any. This was largely due to the perceived tension between solidarity and state sovereignty in the scheme, as some member states saw mandatory refugee quotas as encroaching on the latter. An attempt to force states to comply only exacerbated the already existing rift between old and new EU member states, anti-immigrant sentiment, and Euroscepticism, as evidenced by the Brexit referendum and the 2019 European Parliament elections, hampering much needed reform on EU migration policy. The main argument of this article is that while there is a common approach to asylum law in the EU, this is a fairly minimalist approach and that immigration policy in general has been for a very long time one of the issue-areas most resistant to Europeanisation and harmonisation.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019
The European Union officially proclaims to have a common refugee policy. However, the common treaties leave a great deal of discretion to the individual member countries, which allows them to regulate refugee migration while still upholding international treaties. Member countries have authority over border controls, the processing of asylum applications as well as economic benefits provided to refugees. We show that the differences in refugee flows are so extensive and systematic that the existence of a common EU refugee policy is debatable. The commitments made by the member countries are largely voluntary, and refugee policy is mainly determined at the national level. The discrepancies between the member countries strongly signal that the European Union may not be an optimal region for a common refugee policy. A refugee policy should instead be determined at the national level concordant with the regional and local level, where integration measures are implemented in practice. Meanwhile, the European Union can play an important role through refugee aid to afflicted countries, treaties with third countries, rescue actions in the Mediterranean and control of the external EU borders.
A fair distribution of refugees in the European Union
In light of the large recent inflow of refugees to the EU and the Commission’s efforts to relocate them, I raise the question of what a fair distribution of refugees between EU countries would look like. More specifically, I consider what concerns such a distributive scheme should be sensitive to. First, I put forward some arguments for why states are obligated to admit refugees and outline how I believe the EU should respond to the refugee crisis. This involves, among other things, resettling a proportion of refugees from countries neighbouring Syria in the EU. Second, I consider how the intake into the EU should be distributed between member states, that is, the shares different countries can be expected to admit. I discuss the relevance of a number of different factors that may be claimed to affect such shares, including population size, GDP, number of refugees admitted so far, unemployment rate, country-specific costs and cultural ‘closeness’. Third, I consider whether the distributive scheme should be restricted to reflect specific states’ responsibility for creating refugees in the first place, levels of racism and xenophobia, and whether other states are required to pick up the slack if some refuse to admit their fair share.
JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies
Traditionally, differences in states' refugee protection contributions have been attributed to the variation in countries' structural pull-factors such as their geographic location. However, policy choices, such as Germany's decision to open its borders for Syrian refugees in 2015, can also have a significant impact on the number of arrivals and constitute a puzzle that traditional approaches struggle to explain. This paper demonstrates that viewing refugee burden-sharing through the lens of public goods theory can provide significant insights about refugee protection dynamics in the EU, in particular in the context of a sudden mass influx of migrants that threatens internal security. By highlighting how free-riding and burden-shifting dynamics can undermine the provision of collective goods during a refugee crisis, a public goods approach can advance our understanding of why countries sometimes accept disproportionate responsibilities for forced migrants and how the effectiveness of EU refugee burden-sharing instruments can, and should, be strengthened.
The European Union and the Return of the Nation State
The European Union officially proclaims to have a common asylum policy. However, the common treaties leave a great deal of discretion to the individual member countries, which allow them to regulate refugee migration while still upholding international treaties. Member countries have authority over border controls, the processing of asylum applications as well as economic benefits provided to refugees. We show that the differences in refugee flows are so extensive and systematic that the existence of a common EU asylum policy is debatable. The commitments made by the member countries are largely voluntary, and asylum policy is mainly determined at the national level. The discrepancies between the member countries strongly signal that the European Union may not be an optimal region for a common asylum policy. An asylum policy should instead be determined at the national level concordant with the regional and local level, where integration measures are implemented in practice. Meanwhile, the European Union can play an important role through refugee aid to afflicted countries, treaties with third countries, rescue actions in the Mediterranean and control of the external EU borders.