Last Updated on April 4, 2024 by Ranking
The Common European Asylum System (CEAS) aims to establish common standards for determining refugee status among EU member states. Geographers are interested in the everyday encounters of actors, from migrants to judges and security guards. We identify a key area of difference at the level of concrete, everyday implementation that has largely escaped attention in academia.
We draw on ethnography of over 850 asylum hearings in five different EU countries, as well as interviews with people involved in the appeals process in three countries. Our findings have implications for the notion of a “common” European asylum system. CEAS seeks to harmonize law and legal processes at a highly abstract level. A geographical view of legal practice reveals a world full of contextual, underlying diversity and specificity.
Refugees in the EU and their correlation with the number of asylum applications, terrorist incidents, the economic viability of destination countries and the gender of asylum seekers. Measuring and comparing asylum rates and policies in different countries poses many methodological difficulties. There is also a lack of clarity about the impact of governments’ policy positions on the number of asylum applications they receive.
The CEAS legislation includes “loophole techniques” that create an “illusion of protection” for refugees while retaining little substance. A study commissioned by the European Parliament (Directorate-General for Internal Policies, 2016, pp. 8–12) notes that “[t]he European asylum system is not ‘common’ in the sense of a single EU-wide asylum system.”
Although laws may vary formally and explicitly across space, the same formal laws are also often modified locally through “informal rules and knowledge, as well as social customs and norms” (Bartel et al., 2013, p. 340). Focusing on them can productively destabilize law’s “self-authorizing claims to unity and coherence” Too often, abstract understandings of law “ignore the spatial heterogeneity and geographically grounded nature of its own processes”
Legal geographers have also paid attention to materialism because of the entanglement of matter and meaning (Davies, 2017), matter “is an underappreciated presence throughout the life of law,” write Bennett and Layard. In the case of courts, trials and hearings, evidence and exhibits are particularly important.
Geographers studying migration governance in the EU are following these changes live (Papada, Papoutsi, Painter, & Vradis, 2020; Taz-zioli, 2018). Researchers noted the widespread use of logistics terminology such as “hubs”, “platforms” and “corridors”. Innovations such as hotspots covered by EU legislation are designed as logistical tools that locate, sort and detain people arriving at the EU border.
We focused exclusively on cases involving adult asylum seekers, although sometimes their children were present at the hearings. The location of the court is important to appellants because getting there can be stressful. Belgium and France had one central facility, while Germany, Italy and the UK heard asylum applications in multiple regional courts. In the case of more remote courts, located outside major metropolitan areas, the percentage of unrepresented appellants may be higher.
In Germany, we observed significantly faster hearings in some federal states. In Dusseldorf, some hearings last only 15 minutes, and one judge can hear up to eight hearings a day. In Berlin, on the other hand, hearings usually last about two hours, and judges usually hear two or three cases a day. A system of decentralized regional courts may also result in different judicial cultures in different hearing centers.
The data revealed a significant disconnect among EU Member States between a central court hearing all asylum appeals or a more decentralized system. Some countries considered that an interview lasting 15-20 minutes was sufficient to consider an asylum application. Other countries and courts have encouraged much longer engagements, providing very different interpretations of what legal deliberations and fair hearings mean in practice.
Countries also differed in the openness of interrogations, which contributed to the “dual project of seeing and hiding” the law (Braverman, 2011, p. 173). Some countries, such as France, Germany and the UK, organize public hearings that anyone (including researchers) can attend, while other countries, such as Italy, organize in-person hearings that are not publicly available.
EU countries take very different approaches to the material organization of interrogations. Some people keep them on paper, some keep them in person, and still others use a variable balance between the two, such as when using video technology. Some countries allow video technology to play an important role in this process, while others do not. These differences show that “bringing performativity to the fore” can help understand the practical implementation of law.
In Germany, almost all of the hearings we observed were recorded by the judge on a dictaphone. Security arrangements also varied depending on the size of the court, the security threats present at the time and the culture in each court. Austria was the only country in our sample where participants’ identities were checked in the interview room at the beginning of each interview.
We agree with critical scholars of EU refugee law who see CEAS as “a work in progress, not a legal reality.” simply ambiguous or extra-legal. This classification helps explain the persisting gray area in the implementation of refugee law.
This does not mean that all the differences we have identified justify intervention to “level up” the conditions and practices of refugee law. The differences may simply reflect alternative ways of doing things, often related to each state’s administrative law history and other decision-making structures. For example, it is not clear whether an auspicious or modest courtroom is preferable.
