This timely volume seeks to examine two of the most pertinent current challenges faced by asylum seekers in gaining access to international refugee protection: first, the obstacles to physical access to territory and, second, the barriers to accessing a quality asylum procedure – which the editors have termed 'access to justice'. To address these aims, the book brings together leading commentators from a range of backgrounds, including law, sociology and political science. It also includes contributions from NGO practitioners. This allows the collection to offer interdisciplinary analysis and to incorporate both theoretical and practical perspectives on questions of immense contemporary significance. While the examination offers a strong focus on European legal and policy developments, the book also addresses the issues in different regions (Europe, North America, the Middle East, Africa and Australia). Given the currency of the questions under debate, this book will be essential reading for all scholars in the field of asylum law.

Migration on the Move examines the dynamics of migration and asylum law over the past two decades and highlights profound changes that have taken place in these fields as a result of growing EU competences to deal with migration and asylum questions. The book maps the transformation of the migration field by focusing on three interrelated issues: the effects of Europeanization and the shifting power relations that it implies; placing Europe’s laws and policies in a global migration context, and critically examining to whom ‘project’ Europe belongs. The contributors offer a multidisciplinary analysis of key aspects of the migration and refugee crisis and their implications for policies, principles of law, and the treatment of people in Europe today.

This open access book examines everyday practices in an asylum administration. Asylum decisions are often criticised as being ‘subjective’ or ‘arbitrary’. Asylum Matters turns this claim on its head. Through the ethnographic study of asylum decision-making in the Swiss Secretariat for Migration, the book shows how regularities in administrative practice and ‘socialised subjectivity’ are produced. It argues that asylum caseworkers acquire an institutional habitus through their socialisation on the job, making them ‘carriers’ of routine practices. The different chapters of the book deal with what it means to methodologically study administrative practice: with how asylum proceedings work in Switzerland and with the role different types of knowledge play in overcoming the uncertainties inherent in refugee status and credibility determination. It sheds light on organisational socialisation processes and on the professional norms and values at the heart of administrative work. By doing so, it shows how disbelief becomes normalised in the office. This book speaks to legal scholars, sociologists, anthropologists, human geographers and political scientists interested in bureaucracy, asylum law, migration studies and socio-legal studies, and to NGOs working in the field of asylum.

This timely volume seeks to examine two of the most pertinent current challenges faced by asylum seekers in gaining access to international refugee protection: first, the obstacles to physical access to territory and, second, the barriers to accessing a quality asylum procedure – which the editors have termed 'access to justice'. To address these aims, the book brings together leading commentators from a range of backgrounds, including law, sociology and political science. It also includes contributions from NGO practitioners. This allows the collection to offer interdisciplinary analysis and to incorporate both theoretical and practical perspectives on questions of immense contemporary significance. While the examination offers a strong focus on European legal and policy developments, the book also addresses the issues in different regions (Europe, North America, the Middle East, Africa and Australia). Given the currency of the questions under debate, this book will be essential reading for all scholars in the field of asylum law.

In the first dedicated monograph on article 16 of the 1951 Refugee Convention, Emma Dunlop positions the article within the broader context of public international law, presenting a comprehensive account of asylum seekers' and refugees' right of access to courts.

Adequate and fair asylum procedures are a precondition for the effective exercise of rights granted to asylum applicants, in particular the prohibition of refoulement. In 1999 the EU Member States decided to work towards a Common European Asylum System. In this context the Procedures Directive was adopted in 2005 and recast in 2013. This directive provides for important procedural guarantees for asylum applicants, but also leaves much discretion to the EU Member States to design their own asylum procedures. This book examines the meaning of the EU right to an effective remedy in terms of the legality and interpretation of the Procedures Directive in regard to several key aspects of asylum procedure: the right to remain on the territory of the Member State, the right to be heard, the standard and burden of proof and evidentiary assessment, judicial review and the use of secret evidence.

Democracy and citizenship are conceptually and empirically contested. Against the backdrop of recent and current profound transformations in and of democratic societies, this volume presents and discusses acute contestations, within and beyond national borders and boundaries. Democracy’s crucial relationships, between state and citizenry as well as amongst citizens, are rearranged and re-ordered in various spheres and arenas, impacting on core democratic principles such as accountability, legitimacy, participation and trust. This volume addresses these refigurations by bringing together empirical analyses and conceptual considerations regarding the access to and exclusion from citizenship rights in the face of migration regulation and institutional transformation, and the role of violence in maintaining or undermining social order. With its critical reflection on the consequences and repercussions of such processes for citizens’ everyday lives and for the meaning of citizenship altogether, this book transgresses disciplinary boundaries and puts into dialogue the perspectives of political theory and sociology.