The Soho Hotel, housing 150 refugees mainly from Syria and Iraq, is one of two SolidarityNow buildings in Athens supported by UNHCR and funded by the EU. NurPhoto/ Press Association. All rights reserved.Southern European countries and more specifically Greece and Italy have faced rising flows of asylum seekers and irregular migrants since 2013, and particularly during the 2015-2016 period.
Indeed no-one predicted the dramatic escalation of irregular maritime arrivals during 2015, lasting till March 2016 along the Turkey-Greece corridor, and to this day along the Libya-Italy corridor. Major challenges that such arrivals bring to light include the need for internal EU solidarity in sharing responsibility, the ‘burden’ of processing asylum seeking applications, and eventually of integrating those admitted as refugees.
The Emergency Relocation Mechanism launched first in May 2015 and further expanded in September 2015[1] has played an important role as an EU policy response, seeking to enforce the more equitable sharing of responsibility for asylum-seekers among member-states, and thereby taking some of the pressure off the frontline states.
