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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
In 2014 the total number of applications for asylum in Poland by nationals of all countries reached just over 8,000.[1] Compared to 428,000 in Hungary or 646,000 in Italy (two other states situated at the EU’s external border), the Polish…
An increasing number of children are migrating to Europe on their own in order to escape persecution, conflict, violence and poverty or seeking family reunification, educational or economic opportunities. Many are making very dangerous voyages, across land and sea, and…