Backstage: Reforming the European asylum system

Asylum is a fundamental human right and an international obligation, first recognised in the 1951 Geneva Convention on the protection of refugees. Between 2013 and 2017, 4 million asylum applications were filed in the EU. This high number resulted in growing tensions between Member States, with some of them displaying non-cooperative behaviour.

The migration crisis of 2015 revealed the inadequacies of European legal tools and, by extension, management of migration flows. In this context, Institut Montaigne jointly with Terra Nova have written a report which calls for a reform of the European asylum policy and for a rapid, unified response to the humanitarian emergency in the Mediterranean.

In the context of recent rise of populism and nationalist tendencies in Europe, creating a binding mechanism for solidarity is a daunting task. Currently, the EU is in the process of reshaping the Common European Asylum System, but the negotiations have shown close to no progression.

In this episode of Backstage, Elina Ribakova, a visiting fellow at Bruegel welcomes Marc-Olivier Padis, head of studies department at Terra Nova, and Jean-Paul Tran Thiet, senior fellow at Institut Montaigne, to make a case for this reform. Together, they discuss the key elements of the revised system, which include improved monitoring of the asylum process, as well as efforts for equitable burden sharing.

For further reading, we recommend our blueprint “People on the move: migration and mobility in the European Union“, written by Uuriintuya Batsaikhan, Zsolt Darvas and Inês Gonçalves Raposo.

Zolt Darvas also contributed to the debate on migration and refugees in Europe with two blogs on similar topics: “Beyond border control, migrant integration policies must be revived“ and “The challenge of fostering financial inclusion of refugees“.

This podcast episode was recorded during an event Saving the right to asylum on March 5th, 2019.