People march through central London as part of a protest rally organised by Solidarity with Refugees in September 2016. Yui Mok/Press Association. All rights reserved.
Measures taken by the European Union as a response to the high numbers of refugee movements into Europe the past 16 months raise serious concerns as to the functions and implications of European solidarity both in terms of state obligations and refugee rights. To be sure, all EU member states are parties to the 1951 Refugee Convention and have accepted the same obligations towards individuals described and defined according to the same criteria. Additionally, measures enhancing asylum and refugee protection under the so-called Common European Asylum System (CEAS) are supposed to be based on solidarity between states. EU treaties and, in particular, Article 80 TFEU explicitly demand fair sharing of responsibilities, however they leave it to states to decide how to give effect to this principle.
In the following lines I will briefly go through two schemes that allocate asylum-related responsibilities between states: the Dublin mechanism within the EU and the EU-Turkey statement. I will explain how states’ asylum-related responsibilities suffer both legally and morally as a result of how these systems are operationalised. I suggest that both schemes use solidarity as a euphemism for avoiding or shifting responsibility and, ironically, for de-solidarising protection instead of signifying a humane policy. In that sense, and although solidarity has been invoked as a response to the so-called “refugee crisis”, the way it has been conceptualised makes it part of the problem.
