Normative Challenges of the European Asylum System
Normative Challenges of the European Asylum System
Cooperation Group
Mai 2021 - February 2024
In the European Union, responsibility sharing in refugee protection is organized through supranational regulations. This fact raises several important questions: What kind of regulations are necessary to ensure fairness for each of the states? What conditions are necessary to ensure that responsibility sharing among states is also fair to refugees? How should the EU behave towards third countries and refugees living in third countries? These questions are reflected in the current controversies about the reform of the Dublin Regulation and the events at the external frontiers.
In the Cooperation Group Normative Challenges of the European Asylum System, lawyers, philosophers and political scientists investigate different patterns of responsibility sharing in refugee protection. Their main questions are: which patterns are conceivable for Europe, and how are they to be evaluated normatively? To this end, the cooperation group employs normative standards of three kinds: legal standards - in particular the basic and human rights law and EU constitutional requirements -, as well as philosophical standards of justice and political standards of democratic theory.
The Cooperation Group is especially interested in the question of how to balance the interests of refugees and the interests of states in a system of shared responsibility, as well as how to overcome the normative challenges associated with externalizing refugee protection. What kind of responsibility does a state bear for violations of rights that occur after the transfer to the target state? How is the legitimacy of the so-called "refugee markets", which distribute protection tasks using an economic mechanism, to be assessed? Furthermore, the cooperation group will also critically evaluate some common assumptions underlying the debate on responsibility sharing. For example, the group will examine the European perspective and its focus on refugees who have already reached the territorial borders of Europe.
Members
- Convenors
Svenja Ahlhaus (Hamburg, GER)
Svenja Ahlhaus is a postdoctoral research associate in political theory at University of Hamburg. Her research focuses on democratic theory, membership and migration theory, and international political theory.
Matthias Hoesch (Münster, GER)
Matthias Hoesch is head of a project on the ethics of migration at the cluster of excellence Religion and Politics, University of Münster. His research focusses on political philosophy. Especially, he is interested in the ethics of refugee protection, territorial justice, the ethics of integration and Immanuel Kant's practical philosophy.
Susanne Mantel (Saarbrücken, GER)
Susanne Mantel is a postdoc researcher in philosophy at Saarland University (Saarbrücken) and has been a postdoc fellow at the DFG-funded center for advanced studies Justitia Amplificata (Rethinking Justice – Applied and Global) (Frankfurt/Berlin). She works on political philosophy, especially duties of admission and refugees, as well as the theory of normativity.
Petra Sußner (Berlin, GER)
Petra Sußner is based at Humboldt University Berlin. She is a senior researcher at the DFG research group Law-Gender-Collectivity and her research focuses on migration law, environmental law and the role of courts in european legal orders. She obtained her PhD at the University of Vienna in 2019 with a thesis on Forced Migration, Gender and Sexuality.- Fellows