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    European Union and Asyluum

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    Raluca Estera Cârdei
    The document discusses the European response to the Syrian refugee crisis of 2015-2016. It argues that while Europe claims to uphold values of human dignity and human rights, its response was characterized more by realpolitik and concerns over sovereignty than a generous approach to asylum. Interviews with refugees suggest they saw asylum and protection as meaning safety, opportunity, and integration - being able to rebuild their lives. However, the document argues asylum and protection have become more complex concepts for European states, focused more on international norms and state interests than the needs and perspectives of refugees themselves.

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    European Union and Asyluum

    Uploaded by

    Raluca Estera Cârdei
    37 views6 pages
    The document discusses the European response to the Syrian refugee crisis of 2015-2016. It argues that while Europe claims to uphold values of human dignity and human rights, its response was characterized more by realpolitik and concerns over sovereignty than a generous approach to asylum. Interviews with refugees suggest they saw asylum and protection as meaning safety, opportunity, and integration - being able to rebuild their lives. However, the document argues asylum and protection have become more complex concepts for European states, focused more on international norms and state interests than the needs and perspectives of refugees themselves.

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    The document discusses the European response to the Syrian refugee crisis of 2015-2016. It argues that while Europe claims to uphold values of human dignity and human rights, its response was characterized more by realpolitik and concerns over sovereignty than a generous approach to asylum. Interviews with refugees suggest they saw asylum and protection as meaning safety, opportunity, and integration - being able to rebuild their lives. However, the document argues asylum and protection have become more complex concepts for European states, focused more on international norms and state interests than the needs and perspectives of refugees themselves.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    37 views6 pages

    European Union and Asyluum

    Uploaded by

    Raluca Estera Cârdei
    The document discusses the European response to the Syrian refugee crisis of 2015-2016. It argues that while Europe claims to uphold values of human dignity and human rights, its response was characterized more by realpolitik and concerns over sovereignty than a generous approach to asylum. Interviews with refugees suggest they saw asylum and protection as meaning safety, opportunity, and integration - being able to rebuild their lives. However, the document argues asylum and protection have become more complex concepts for European states, focused more on international norms and state interests than the needs and perspectives of refugees themselves.

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    of 6

    Journal of Human Rights Practice, 2017, 1–6

    doi: 10.1093/jhuman/hux016
    Opinion Piece

    Asylum, Refugee Protection and the


    European Response to Syrian Migration
    Dallal Stevens*

    Abstract
    The recent increase in migration to the European Union raised many concerns for
    the EU, for Member States and for the individual. Much of the discussion hitherto
    has been focused on the EU from a state perspective and has been concerned with
    the policies proposed and adopted to address and limit inward movement of peo-
    ples. One issue that has not received requisite attention is that of the meaning of
    ‘protection’ from the individual claimant’s point of view. This article reflects on the
    Syrian migration of 2015 and 2016 and the implications of a triumph of realpolitik—
    that is, state sovereignty—over a generous, meaningful and humane approach to
    asylum.

    Keywords: asylum; Europe; protection; refugee; Syrian

    In 2014 and 2015, the world watched with astonishment and alarm, as hundreds of thousands
    of people crossed seas, walked great distances, climbed barbed wire fences, forged rivers, en-
    dured indignity and ill-treatment, battled the elements, experienced lack of food, water and
    shelter, and risked their lives to gain entry to the European Union (EU) to request asylum.
    How was it, in Europe, that chaos rather than order emerged? How was it that, despite indis-
    putable evidence of great suffering, the enormous machinery of the EU ground to a shuddering
    halt, seemingly unable or unwilling to assist those in need or offer practical solutions? After
    all, this was the same Europe for which the 1951 Refugee Convention, with its million post-
    Second World War refugees, was drafted and implemented.1 This was the Europe, as the EU,
    that proudly proclaimed amongst its foundational values respect for ‘human dignity, freedom,

    * The author ([email protected]) is a Reader and Director of Research at the School of


    Law, University of Warwick.
    1 The 1951 UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees contained a time limitation in Article
    1A(2), which referred to ‘events occurring before 1 January 1951’, and the option, in Article 1B, for
    states to agree to the application of the Convention either to events in Europe alone or ‘in Europe
    or elsewhere’—known as the geographical limitation. The subsequent 1967 Protocol lifted the time
    and geographic limitations (except for those states who wished to maintain the geographical limi-
    tation of the Convention).

    C The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
    V
    For Permissions, please email: [email protected]
    2 Dallal Stevens

    democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of per-
    sons belonging to minorities’ (Consolidated Version of the Treaty on the European Union:
    Article 2). Such values, it asserted, were ‘common to the Member States in a society in which
    pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and
    men prevail’ (ibid.). Finally, and perhaps most ironically, this Europe had constructed, in the
    guise of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), the most complex regional asylum
    framework of minimum standards of protection, reception conditions and procedures.
    So, what went wrong? What does this unedifying episode tell us about the current state of
    refugee protection in the EU? Has refugee protection, as presently understood, run its course?

    The meaning of asylum and protection for the refugee


    Before such questions can be answered, it is worth pausing to reflect on what motivated the
    migration and what those on the move were, in fact, seeking. According to the
    International Organization for Migration (IOM), almost 82 per cent of people arriving in
    Europe in 2015 were from four nationalities: Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Eritrea (IOM
    2015). While the cumulative arrivals from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq declined throughout
    2016 to 41 per cent, the numbers from Africa, especially Nigeria and Eritrea, increased
    (IOM 2016). Drivers of migration were multifaceted and complex but these were all—and
    continue to be—countries facing conflict, internal violence and human rights infringements.
    Any view that these populations were not forced to move—whether it be to escape conflict
    or violence, or to survive—is not supported by the evidence.
    Interviews conducted with migrants and refugees in 2015 and 2016 provide interesting
    insights to nuanced perceptions of protection and its objectives, which very much reflect the
    original aims of the Refugee Convention.2 For example, for one interview subject asylum
    meant ‘getting [a] residence permit. If I get a residence permit, I can . . . be integrated, go to
    school, join the society. . . . we don’t get afraid; we don’t get afraid of anything. . . . [It means]
    protection of the human being, human rights.’ Another stated, ‘for me, safety and citizenship
    is the same thing. I want a place that can provide me protection in order to be able to bring
    my family to live all together there.’ A third perceived asylum as a way ‘to build a future . . .
    and have a life; build a future for my children, so that they can have a better life’.
    In other words, there is a disarming purity to these conceptualizations of protection and
    asylum: for the individual, they denote not only safety but crucially an opportunity to live a
    life of meaning, to reunite with family, to offer hope and a future to children, to try to flour-
    ish as a human being. The interviewees clearly recognized that, for this to be achieved,
    membership of—and integration into—a new community was called for.

    The meaning of asylum and refugee protection for the European Union
    The simplicity of these understandings of asylum and protection have arguably been lost in
    the EU and its Member States (alongside many countries around the globe), and one might
    suggest deliberately so. While there is an underlying assumption to the enquiry posed by
    this collection—namely, that there is consensus about the core content of such protection—

    2 Interviews were undertaken by the author and co-investigators with about 250 people who entered
    the EU in 2015 and 2016, as part of a research project, ‘Crossing the Mediterranean Sea by Boat:
    Mapping and Documenting Migratory Journeys and Experiences’. (See also Crawley et al. 2016.)
    European Response to Syrian Migration 3

    understanding what is meant by protection is not so clear-cut (Stevens 2013; Storey 2016).
    Asylum is itself multidimensional and has many meanings (Grahl-Madsen 1980; Gunter
    Plaut 1995; Goodwin-Gill and McAdam 2007: Ch. 7). There is a tendency to consider asy-
    lum and protection from a top-down perspective, with reference to international legal
    norms, international relations, state interests and institutional players. Asylum and protec-
    tion have been crafted over decades, addressing, in the main, the concerns of the powerful;
    it is rare to hear the voice of the refugee, what she desires or needs, or to recognize the strat-
    egies adopted by the refugee in achieving an alternative form of protection—what might be
    termed, to paraphrase Betts (2010), ‘survival protection’.
    Considering the historical antecedents of many member states, and their own experi-
    ences of war and displacement, the EU (and formerly the European Community) has had,
    arguably, a rather curious relationship with asylum and refugee protection. On the one
    hand, EU asylum policy is clearly positioned within the ‘meta-values’ of the EU, as outlined
    above, especially those of human dignity, respect for human rights and solidarity. The im-
    portance of international protection for persons in need litters EU documentation; the insti-
    tutions of the EU have all, at various times, iterated their full commitment to protection
    and the Refugee Convention. The European Council meeting in Tampere in 1999, in a sig-
    nificant step in the development of a CEAS, declared that its aim was an ‘open and secure
    European Union, fully committed to the obligations of the Geneva Refugee Convention and
    other human rights instruments, and able to respond to humanitarian needs on the basis of
    solidarity’ (European Council, Tampere, 1999). The CEAS ostensibly meets these objectives
    with its acknowledgement that the Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol ‘provide the
    cornerstone of the international legal regime for the protection of refugees’ (Directive 2011/
    95/EU: para. 4) and the declaration that ‘solidarity is a pivotal element in the CEAS’
    (Regulation 604/2013: para. 22), while remaining largely undefined and somewhat concep-
    tually disputed.3 A ‘right to asylum’ is now provided by the EU Charter of Fundamental
    Rights (Article 18), leading to academic argument for a right to be granted asylum (Gil-
    Bazo 2008) while the Court of Justice of the EU provides interpretative guidance on asylum
    law, with the possibility of enhancing protection standards; however, its jurisprudence to
    date has had a mixed reception (Banks 2015).
    On the other hand, as widely documented, the recognition of fundamental rights and
    the primacy of the Refugee Convention, the establishment of minimum acceptable stan-
    dards for asylum applicants and agreement on the core content of international protection
    to be granted to beneficiaries, has not been the panacea suggested by those advocating a
    harmonized asylum policy—this despite nigh on three decades of EU, EC and intergovern-
    mental concern with the asylum issue. Asylum seekers must overcome a variety of state-
    imposed hurdles: inter alia, extra-territorialization migration measures, border controls,
    third country removals, interception at sea, ‘push-backs’, and visas. In the 1980s and
    1990s, it was popular to talk of ‘fortress Europe’ and the creation of a ‘cordon sanitaire’;
    now, the focus is on the prosaic ‘access to asylum’, but the argument remains the same: any
    improvements to Member States’ treatment of asylum seekers in their territories do little to

    3 Article 80 Consolidated Version of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU states that ‘[t]he policies
    of the Union set out in this Chapter [border checks, asylum and immigration] and their implementa-
    tion shall be governed by the principle of solidarity and fair sharing of responsibility, including its
    financial implications, between the Member States’.
    4 Dallal Stevens

    enhance access to asylum and protection (see e.g. Gammeltoft-Hansen 2011). And without
    enhanced access, refugee protection remains a distant dream for the individual.

    Asylum and refugee protection in 2015 and 2016


    As the cordon sanitaire was breached, and desperate people made their way across
    European territory, the true face of EU asylum refugee protection emerged: the CEAS was
    not common; solidarity was not universal; mistrust rather than mutual trust triumphed; EU
    values could be ignored at will; a Directive specifically designed to offer temporary protec-
    tion in situations of ‘mass influx’ was ignored. Instead, panicking Member States and EU
    institutions scrambled to find a politically palatable solution; the outcome: the European
    Agenda on Migration and the EU Turkey Statement; the clear aim: putting an end to in-
    ward migration. The CEAS is to be revisited to ensure full implementation. Directives are
    to become Regulations, removing optionality for Member States and imposing uniformity.4
    The focus is on reducing incentives; preventing primary movements of people to—and sec-
    ondary movements in—the EU; facilitating third country removals; promoting the return of
    irregular migrants. The impact on access to protection, particularly as understood by the in-
    dividual asylum seeker, is hardly addressed, beyond the inadequate resettlement quota.5
    Meanwhile, with the closure of borders, more than 60,000 people were trapped in
    Greece, scattered across urban settings, formal and informal camps and so-called ‘hotspots’
    on the islands of Lesvos, Chios, Samos and Kos. Transformed very quickly from a country
    of transit to one of containment, Greece struggled to cope. Conditions in informal camps
    and in hotspot detention centres are often very poor; there is little access to information;
    there are serious delays to registration, asylum processing, family reunification or reloca-
    tion elsewhere in the EU (see Squire et al. 2016). Even where political leadership and hu-
    manity was shown, as in the case of Germany,6 the reality of protection on the ground is
    revealing. For example, a change in policy in 2016 in Germany withdrew the automatic
    grant of refugee status to Syrians and replaced it with subsidiary protection, with conse-
    quences for family reunification.7 Perhaps more than any other aspect of the current prob-
    lems faced by protection seekers, delays and refusals of family reunification cause the
    greatest distress.
    With such obvious state and institutional failures, alternative forms and places of pro-
    tection materialized, challenging the status quo and with a focus on the local: individual ac-
    tors emerged across Europe to offer aid and assistance, termed by Papataxiarchis, in the
    Greek context, as ‘solidarians’, ‘volunteers’, ‘professional humanitarians’, and the ‘ordinary

    4 It is proposed that the Procedures and Qualification Directives (European Parliament and Council
    of the EU 2013a, 2011) become Regulations, while the Reception Conditions Directive (European
    Parliament and Council of the EU 2013b) remains a Directive.
    5 At 2 March 2017, Member States had provided only 14,422 resettlement places of the agreed 22,504
    under the EU resettlement scheme (European Commission 2017).
    6 Many have argued that the decision of Angela Merkel to accept hundreds of thousands of people,
    mainly Syrians, was politically motivated (due to the demographic decline) and not simply a major
    humanitarian gesture; notwithstanding, it is suggested here that moral obligation played a signifi-
    cant part in the political calculation.
    7 Family reunification was suspended for two years from March 2016 for those with subsidiary
    protection.
    European Response to Syrian Migration 5

    people’ (Papataxiarchis 2016). Cities of welcome; cities of sanctuary; human rights cities
    opened their doors and offered access to labour markets irrespective of national policies.8

    Conclusions
    What this brief foray into recent migration events in the EU tells us about refugee protec-
    tion is that it is not necessarily ‘dead’ but it is deeply circumscribed. EU states are clearly
    content to maintain an asylum system that grants certain rights to the very few. Every effort
    will now be spent in trying to avoid any further ‘mass influxes’ while seemingly ‘improving’
    the CEAS. The relatively small numbers who reach an EU state willing to process their asy-
    lum claims will, if they succeed in overcoming the many procedural and substantive obsta-
    cles, benefit from numerous rights accorded by EU law. Such an approach allows for the
    promulgation of the view that the EU continues to be comprised of liberal states that be-
    lieve in fundamental rights, are party to international law and have effectively incorporated
    international refugee law into their regional regime.
    The emergent shoots of what might be termed local protection in the EU is beginning to
    reflect other parts of the world where ‘silent integration’ without de jure status has oc-
    curred. (Bakewell 2011). These alternatives, where supported by host communities and city
    municipalities, whilst having their legal limitations, realize partial integration and member-
    ship and are certainly an interesting development in the protection narrative. Arguably, for
    the September 2016 New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants (UN General
    Assembly 2016) to be more than meaningless political rhetoric, calls for the ‘empowerment’
    of refugees and for a ‘people-centred’ approach need to be properly addressed. A start can
    be made by revisiting protection from the individual’s viewpoint.

    Funding
    The work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [Grant Number ES/
    N013646/1], Crossing the Mediterranean Sea by Boat: Mapping and Documenting Migratory
    Journeys and Experiences http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/research/researchcentres/irs/
    crossingthemed.

    References
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    Zambian Angolan Borderlands. University of Oxford Refugee Studies Centre (RSC), RSC pod-
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    lent-integration-refugees (referenced 10 May 2017).
    Banks, R. 2015. The Potential and Limitation of the Court of Justice of the European Union in
    Shaping International Refugee Law. International Journal of Refugee Law 27(2): 213 44.
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    8 For example, Amsterdam, Lund, Barcelona, Düsseldorf.


    6 Dallal Stevens

    Crawley, H., F. Düvell, K. Jones, S. McMahon, and N. Sigona. 2016. Destination


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