Refugee Protection Regimes: Comparative Report
Ela Gökalp Aras, Zeynep Şahin Mencütek - Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul | Evangelia Papatzani, Nadina Leivaditi, Electra Petracou - University of the Aegean
This comparative report is based on the RESPOND country reports [deliverable D3.1] that discusses the developments regarding legislation, policy measures and practices on refugee protection, but most importantly the implementation aspect in ten countries covered by the project (Austria, Germany, Greece, Iraq, Italy, Lebanon, Poland, Sweden, Turkey and the United Kingdom) for the 2011-2019 period. This report aims to provide a comparative analysis of refugee protection, emphasising the implementation aspect as drawn from the experiences and perceptions of meso and micro level actors. In doing so, the report offers analytical insights for evaluating the implications of the dynamics of refugee protection, which has undergone many changes since 2011.
Despite the largely shared regional, international and supranational obligations regarding refugee protection, the overarching pattern in the field of refugee protection is characterised by a restrictive approach. Although some countries were relatively more welcoming at the beginning Syrian displacement in 2011, such as Turkey (open-doors policy) and Lebanon, restricted access to national/federal territories, additional physical measures such as security walls and other actions such as push backs have become common, hindering the asylum procedure, particularly after 2015. Many countries have introduced additional procedural measures to prevent and restrain access to international protection as well as to speed up asylum assessments, such as accelerated procedures, fast-track-procedures, border procedures. Increased rejections and long waiting periods have become policies in themselves. Almost all countries tended to downgrade the rights of applicants and beneficiaries of protection. In general, all newly introduced amendments or regulations impose new restrictions or limitations to existing standards of rights. However, at the same time, some countries developed policies and practices to respond to the humanitarian crisis and welcomed refugees only from certain nationalities on the grounds of humanitarian or national reasons, through residence permits and family reunification. As for the RESPOND countries who are EU Member States, the observance of the so-called minimum EU-level standards, or even lower, has become common. All countries display an extremely complex and continually changing legal framework on refugee protection. The newly introduced additional procedures result in the fragmentation of the examination of claims through the categorisation of asylum seekers. This also resulted in stratified legal statuses with different procedures and specified rights, adding up to the traceable nationality-based discrimination against certain asylum seekers (e.g. Afghans), creating ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ migrants/refugees.
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