“Freedom, which includes the right to move freely throughout the Union,
can be enjoyed in conditions of security and justice accessible to all.
It would be in contradiction with Europe’s traditions
to deny such freedom to those whose circumstances
lead them justifiably to seek access to our territory”.
Conclusions of the European Council
Tampere (Finland), 15-16 October 1999
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This blog, “Asylum- Europe“, managed and edited by Dr. Salvo Nicolosi, intended to be the web interface of an individual research project on the Common European Asylum System & International Human Rights Standards, sponsored by the University of Ghent and hosted at the Human Rights Centre (Department of European, Public and International Law- EPIL), is conceived of as the mirror-image of the commonly known expression “Fortress-Europe“.
Criticised as being a ‘Fortress‘, “made out of internal and soft controls on the one hand and a certain amount of hardware to detect and identify intruders at the borders on the other hand” (Albrecht, 2002: 21), Europe is also the first land of “asylum” for many migrants fleeing persecution, wars and human disasters. This is why it ”shall develop a common policy on asylum, subsidiary protection and temporary protection with a view to offering appropriate status to any third-country national requiring international protection and ensuring compliance with the principle of non-refoulement” (Art. 78, para. 1, Treaty on the Functioning of the EU).
Intertwined with such acknowledgment, this blog pursues a twofold aim:
- to provide basic information on the European legal framework on asylum.
- to establish a pool of scientific references to favour the enhancement of research in European asylum law.
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Salvo Nicolosi is a Post-doctoral Researcher in International Human Rights Law at the Human Rights Centre of Ghent University. He holds a PhD in International Legal Order and Human Rights from the University “La Sapienza” of Rome and the University of Carthage at Tunis, and defended his thesis on “The Right to Asylum in the Mediterranean”. He serves as Adjunct Lecturer of European Law at the University of Catania, where in 2013 he also designed the module on European Immigration Law. He worked at DG Justice & Home Affairs of the General Secretariat of the Council of the EU and was appointed as International Scholar at the Centre for Global Governance Studies of the KU Leuven.
His research interests include:
- International and European Asylum Law
- Regional Systems of Refugee Protection
- International Humanitarian Law
- European Union Law and Policies
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