Comparative Report: Legal And Policy Framework Of Migration Governance

Building on the RESPOND national country reports, this report discusses the most relevant trends underlying legislative and policy measures implemented between 2011 and 2017 in Austria, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iraq, Italy, Lebanon, Poland, Sweden,Turkey, and the United Kingdom, in the light of critical literature and scholarly debate. The aim is to provide a comparative legal and institutional analysis of migration governance across countries, highlighting trends and similarities, as well as differences and relevant inconsistencies in the response to mass migration. In doing so, the report offers analytical insights for evaluating the potential implications of the dynamics of migration management in the aforementioned countries. In all countries, the legal framework concerning migration and asylum/international protection is extremely complex and hypertrophic. In each country, legislation has been changing continuously and not necessarily coherently, frequently law makers resorting to decrees instead of proper statutes/acts of Parliament. The outcome is a stratified legal framework, that is extremely fragmented and difficult to be consistently interpreted and implemented. Therefore, the legal enforcement and guarantee of fundamental rights is jeopardized, and often it largely depends on the discretionary power of single offices and individuals. Against the fundamental axiom of legal certainty and predictability, the legal status of migrants and asylum applicants is more and more based on uncertainty.