S5 Ep34: Backstage: Reforming the European asylum system

This episode of 'The Sound of Economics' features Bruegel
visiting fellow Elina Ribakova in conversation with Marc-Olivier
Padis and Jean-Paul Tran Thiet about the reform of the Common
European Asylum System (CEAS).


Asylum is a fundamental human right and an international
obligation, first recognised in the 1951 Geneva Convention on the
protection of refugees. Between 2013 and 2017, 4 million asylum
applications were filed in the EU. This high number resulted in
growing tensions between Member States, with some of them
displaying non-cooperative behaviour.


The migration crisis of 2015 revealed the inadequacies of
European legal tools and, by extension, management of migration
flows. In this context, Institut Montaigne jointly with Terra
Nova have written a report which calls for a reform of the
European asylum policy and for a rapid, unified response to the
humanitarian emergency in the Mediterranean.


In the context of recent rise of populism and nationalist
tendencies in Europe, creating a binding mechanism for solidarity
is a daunting task. Currently, the EU is in the process of
reshaping the Common European Asylum System, but the negotiations
have shown close to no progress.


In this episode of Backstage, Elina Ribakova, a visiting fellow
at Bruegel welcomes Marc-Olivier Padis, head of studies
department at Terra Nova, and Jean-Paul Tran Thiet, senior fellow
at Institut Montaigne, to make a case for this reform. Together,
they discuss the key elements of the revised system, which
include improved monitoring of the asylum process, as well as
efforts for equitable burden sharing.


For further reading, we recommend our blueprint “People on the
move: migration and mobility in the European Union“, written by
Uuriintuya Batsaikhan, Zsolt Darvas and Inês Gonçalves Raposo.


Zolt Darvas also contributed to the debate on migration and
refugees in Europe with two blogs on similar topics: “Beyond
border control, migrant integration policies must be revived“ and
“The challenge of fostering financial inclusion of refugees“.


This podcast episode was recorded during an event Saving the
right to asylum on March 5th, 2019.