EU Asylum Policies Through the Lenses of the UN Global Compact on Refugees

• Author: Sergio Carrera - Roberto Cortinovis
• Profession: Senior Research Fellow and Head of the Justice and Home Affairs Programme at CEPS - Researcher in the Justice and Home Affairs Programme at CEPS
• Pages: 105-121

105

9. EU ASYLUM POLICIES

THROUGH THE LENSES OF THE

UN GLOBAL COMPACT ON

REFUGEES

Sergio Carrera and Roberto Cortinovis1

1. Introduction

EU policy debates on asylum over the course of 2019 have revolved

around the need to abandon crisis-led policy-making that had

dominated EU policies in the aermath of the so-called ‘refugee

crisis’ from 2015 onward. e EU response to the crisis produced

a number of controversial policy developments. Emergency meas-

ures adopted during that period, including informal and extra-EU

Treaty instruments of cooperation with third countries, ended up

bypassing the system of checks and balances foreseen by the EU

legal system, raising concerns regarding their compatibility with

EU rule of law and fundamental rights principles and standards

(Carrera, Santos and Strik, 2019).

ese developments stands in direct contradiction with the

Tampere Programme’s aim, laid down in its paragraph 4, to estab-

lish “an open and secure European Union, fully committed to the

1 is Chapter draws from research conducted under the ReSOMA project. ReSOMA

receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation

programme under the grant agreement 770730.

Table of Contents

106 PART II - BORDERS AND ASYLUM

obligation of the Geneva Refugee Convention and other relevant

human rights instruments, and able to respond to humanitarian

needs on the basis of solidarity”. ey are incompatible with the

commitment to the “absolute respect of the right to seek asylum”,

ensuring that “nobody is sent back to persecution, i.e. maintaining

the principle of non-refoulement (paragraph 13 of the Tampere

Conclusions). is Chapter also argues that the ‘informalisation’

and intergovernmentalism characterizing latest EU policies and

initiatives stand at odds with the Lisbon Treaty call for the Union

to establish a common policy on asylum in Article 78.1 TFEU.

In 2016, the European Commission launched an overall reform

of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), which aimed,

among other things, to provide for structural responses to respon-

sibility-sharing issues raised by the refugee crisis by reforming the

EU Dublin system (European Commission, 2016a, 2016b). How-

ever, none of the proposals for the reform of the CEAS presented

by the Commission in 2016 could be nalised before the expiry of

the 2014-2019 legislative term due to the choice of member states

to stick to a logic of consensus and to discuss the asylum reform as

a ‘package’ (Carrera and Cortinovis, 2019a).

e need for a ‘fresh start’ out of the polarized debates of the

post-crisis period may be the reason behind the choice of the new

President of the Commission Ursula von der Leyen to develop a

New ‘Pact on Migration and Asylum’.2 In parallel, the adoption

of the United Nations Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) in

December 2018 and the agenda it lays down to advance respon-

sibility sharing for refugees at the global level fostered a debate

regarding the role and contribution of the EU and its Member

states in the achievement of the Compact’s objectives over the

years to come (Carrera and Cortinovis, 2019b).

In spite of the momentum injected by the agenda of the new

Commission and the steering role played by the implementation

of the UN GCR, policy developments over 2019 have underlined

2 Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission. Mission letter to Ylva

Johansson, Commissioner for Home Aairs, Brussels, 1 December 2019.