Waste of Paper or Useful Tool? The Potential of the Temporary Protection Directive in the Current “Refugee Crisis”

Abstract

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Towards a Common European Space for Asylum

“…Southern and southeastern Member States, particularly Greece and Italy, constitute a border and buffer zone for Schengen and the EU, since they received the greatest numbers of migrants and asylum seekers, due among other reasons to the restrictive policies of the other Member States of the EU. The EU Member States, contrary to the Commission guidelines and propositions, did not adopt a common approach to these movements and had mainly reacted individually [18]. In the beginning, Germany's Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) suspended the Dublin rule by accepting asylum seekers without examining whether they first entered the EU in another Member State (so that, according to the rule, they should be returned to that country) (Dernbach, Andrea, Germany suspends Dublin agreement for Syrian refugees, 29 September 2015, euractiv.com).…”

EU Asylum Governance and E(xc)lusive Solidarity: Insights From Germany

“…It needed to be activated by a qualified majority decision at the suggestion of the European Commission and the request of a member state. Curiously, this instrument was never activated, although Italy attempted, unsuccessfully, in 2011 in response to the increase in arrivals after the Arab Spring (Gluns & Wessels, 2017). Given the disproportionate impact of this mass influx in Germany, it was the most likely country to seek to activate this instrument in 2015.…”

“…The coalition of the unwilling, on the other hand, included Hungary, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, and the UK (von Schmickler & Börnsen, 2016), making German efforts risky in political terms. And finally, Germany would incur significant financial costs to implement the TPD if approved while receiving little in return from the EU (Gluns & Wessels, 2017).…”

Why not Activated? The Temporary Protection Directive and the Mystery of Temporary Protection in the European Union

“…Other authors also suggest that the cumbersome and difficult activation procedure explains its nonimplementation. They note that activation requires complex legal evaluations and a long, strenuous political process to reach a compromise between Member States (Joannin, 2017, p. 4;Orchard and Miller, 2014;Notarbatola di Sciara, 2016;Gluns and Wessels, 2017). They explain that the decision to activate the TPD must be made by Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) with two thirds of the vote -a very high threshold for EU decision-making -especially when the crisis hits small Member States on the border (Akkaya, 2015;Notarbatola di Sciara, 2016).…”