have ‘invested’ 4 years in someone just to send
him or her away as soon as that person gains
socio-economic independence.”
The lack of a cohesive response from the EU
is partly a legacy of the Cold War era in which
the European framework for handling refugees
evolved. At that time, the concept of “refugee”
was understood as referring to the trickle of
people crossing the Iron Curtain, a far different
situation from the waves of refugees that much
poorer regions have dealt with continually over
the last century. Vandevoordt said that scholars
have been arguing for decades that there is a need
to harmonize asylum procedures and law across
the EU: “It is reasonable to say that Merkel’s ‘Wir
schaffen das’ [‘We can handle this’] would indeed
have been viable for the EU as a whole, if there
had been a fair and well-coordinated response
to the asylum crisis at the European level. The
EU can manage these levels of influx of refugees.
However, at the moment there is a race to the
bottom going on with individual member states
trying to minimize refugees’ rights to discourage
them to come to that particular state.” Publicpolitical campaigns announcing the degeneration
of refugee right s are, according to Vandevoordt,
primarily meant to discourage asylum seekers
from coming to that country, rather than as actual
policy measures.
Getting to the root conditions
But Gilbert cautioned that even if wealthy
countries were to take greater responsibility
for hosting refugees and asylum seekers, the
underlying factors behind displacement and
migration require action to be taken by the
international community. “I dislike the term
‘root causes’. I prefer to think of root conditions, of
triggers and drivers,” he explained. “Drivers are
the underlying conditions that make people want
to leave, the trigger is what makes people say ‘Yes,
we’ve got to go now’.”
Viewed this way, the importance of seeking
long-term solutions to the plight of refugees
and displaced people is not simply a matter of
providing immediate humanitarian assistance; it
also means addressing the various factors driving
conflict itself. “Protection of refugees and solutions
for refugees are closely connected, you cannot
separate the humanitarian response, i.e. what you
need when the refugee movement starts, from
seeking a long term solution, i.e. a development
response.” Conflict resolution and the restoration
of peace and stability must be a priority on the
international agenda.
Gilbert stressed that access to resources is often
at the heart of these conflicts, even those that
superficially coalesce around questions of faith or
ethnicity: “By and large they’re not fighting about
faith, they’re fighting about control of territory—
and what that territory gives them.” Resources can
be commercial—oil, coal, diamonds—but they
can also be more elemental to human survival,
i.e. access to water and arable land. He expressed
hope that the recent Paris talks on climate change
and the UN’s newly implemented Sustainable
Development Goals will address the question of
resource distribution, eliminating the sharp divide
between global North and South and giving rise
to a more stable world. These measures, however,
are not sufficient to tackle the issue of unfair
resource distribution within states, which Gilbert
argues is equally pressing. He offered the example
of Boko Haram in Nigeria, which has flourished
in no small part due to the failure of the Nigerian
government to adequately redistribute wealth up
to the impoverished north of the country. It is no
coincidence that Boko Haram is strongest in the
north, where disaffected youth are more easily
seduced by the militant group.
A Human Rights Approach
In acknowledgement of both the global dimension
of the crisis and the failure of EU policies to
cope adequately with its effects, a human rights
approach may be the optimal framework to ensure
that refugees receive fair and adequate assistance.
“International human rights law applies to
everyone within the territory and jurisdiction of a
state,” explained Gilbert. “If you are in a country
of protection that has ratified human rights
treaties, those treaties apply to you as a displaced
person or refugee as much as they do to the
local population. Human rights treaties are not
for citizens, they’re for everyone within a state’s
jurisdiction.”
The 28 EU member states on average host 2.1 refugees per 1,000 citizens (mid-2015).
Distribution across the 28 EU member states of the 626,700 asylum requests that were
registered in the EU between January and July 2015 (in %)
Other countries
Hungary
Germany
Belgium
UK
Sweden
8
Italy
France
Austria