Graduate Institute Professor of International Law, Vincent Chetail and PhD student Céline Bauloz released this week “The European Union and the Challenges of Forced Migration: From Economic Crisis to Protection Crisis?”, a research report that is part of a large scale project funded by the European Union.

Professor Chetail and Ms Bauloz's report comes at a turning point for the European Union's asylum policy. The Union is currently reassessing its “Common European Asylum System” with a view to consolidating the asylum acquis, the body of European Union law on asylum. In the midst of this reflective period, the report provides a timely and critical analysis of the merits and the flaws of the EU asylum policy in the context of the current economic crisis.

The report identifies and deconstructs the four main strategies developed by the European Union: preventing access to EU territory; combating ‘asylum-shopping’; criminalising failed asylum-seekers and enforcing their return; and promoting the integration of refugees duly recognised as such. This four-pronged strategy has proved instrumental in alleviating asylum pressure over the last decade but has been exacerbated by the current recession. According to the authors, the most pressing challenge is to prevent the economic crisis from transforming into a protection crisis at the expense of refugee rights. Against this background, the report lays down a comprehensive set of policy recommendations for the purpose of reshaping the Common European Asylum System with respect to international norms.

“The European Union and the Challenges of Forced Migration” is part of the international research project: Improving EU and US Immigration Systems, funded by the European Commission, and managed by the European University Institute (Florence) and the Migration Policy Institute (Washington). The project aims to identify ways in which the EU and US immigration systems might be substantially improved in order to address the major challenges faced by policymakers on either side of the Atlantic.

Vincent Chetail is Associate Professor of Public International Law at the Institute and Research Director at the Programme for the Study of Global Migration and at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.

Céline Bauloz is teaching assistant at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. She is writing a PhD thesis at the Graduate Institute on the compatibility of the EU asylum policy with international law.