Passing through Greece
Until the partial opening of the borders through the Balkans in summer 2015, Patras – Greece’s third city and harbour – used to be the main transit port for irregular migrants heading to Italy and the rest of Europe. In…
Bulgaria’s struggle at the frontline
Bulgaria is one among many European countries dealing with insufficient capacity and unhelpful nationalist politics in the recent ‘migration crisis’. The response to the increase in irregular entries across the Bulgarian-Turkish border since 2013 has been one of crisis management;…
Protecting asylum seekers in mixed flows: lessons from Bulgaria
In countries where irregular entry is a criminal offence, persons in need of international protection arriving as part of mixed flows are at risk of being prosecuted. Under Bulgarian law, foreigners may be sanctioned for crossing the border illegally by…
Envisioning a Common European Asylum System
Europe continues to attract people facing persecution but the responsibility for receiving them is not shared equally amongst Member States. While Germany and Sweden together host nearly half of all asylum seekers in the European Union (EU), the countries on Europe’s borders receive…
Are asylum and immigration really a European Union issue?
It is redundant to say that the European Union (EU) is failing itself, failing refugees and failing humanity with its current policy towards immigration and asylum. The daily reports of more deaths at sea and on land, of battles between…
Social protection: a fourth durable solution?
A pilot project called ‘Regional Mobility and Socioeconomic Integration of Refugees’ was proposed in 2014 as part of the Brazil Declaration and Plan of Action.[1] In practical terms it consists of a project to bring Colombian refugees in Ecuador to…
In search of fairness in responsibility sharing
The European Union’s (EU’s) asylum system is riddled with factors that hold back its development. First of all, the responsibility-determination mechanism (the Dublin system) fails to share responsibility fairly between the Member States, and in addition largely disregards the realities…
Volunteers and asylum seekers
Amid rising numbers of asylum seekers arriving at European shores over recent years, reception and processing facilities – especially in countries of first arrival – were often overburdened. Asylum seekers faced insufficient infrastructure for their reception and integration, leading in…
A welcoming policy in post-socialist East Germany
As former East Germany is now receiving refugees as part of the national distribution scheme, towns there need to adapt to accommodating refugees. There is a range of different attitudes in the East-German context – from the highly defensive to…
Migration terminology matters
Current efforts to discuss and address the ‘migration crisis’ in Europe are marked by polemics, fed in part by imprecise and sometimes inflammatory terminology used to describe migrants. This also risks contributing to the erosion of migrants’ rights. The term…