Migration Governance – Collection of Country Reports: Legal and Policy Framework
Collection of Country Reports | University of Florence
Introduction
Work package 1 “Legal and policy framework: sustainability and interaction” aims at gathering background information about the socio-economic, political, legal and institutional context of migration governance in Austria, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iraq, Italy, Lebanon, Poland, Sweden, Turkey and the UK and at the level of the European Union. WP1 main objectives, are structured in three principal streams: (1) gathering and critically analysing information on the political, legal and institutional context of migration governance, and illustrating national cases through country reports; (2) comparing the national case-studies and discussing the outcome in a comparative report; and (3) retrieving and systematizing a number of indicators available in the most relevant databases in order to create an ad hoc dataset on socio-economic, cultural, political and legal indicators on migration governance covering all RESPOND countries.
Deliverable D1.2 is the product of the first stream of activities. In compliance with the Grant Agreement, the University of Florence team (UNIFI) drafted the WP1 report guidelines, which were discussed in the kick-off meeting in Uppsala (1-3 December 2017), then reviewed by UNIFI and circulated among all partners involved in WP1, and finally submitted to the European Commission as Deliverable D1.1. Once national chapter drafted, they underwent a double peer review process, in line with RESPOND Quality Assurance Plan (D11.1): first by a national expert selected by national teams, and second by UNIFI.
In order to offer a comprehensive understanding of the legal and policy framework of migration governance in different countries, all country reports presented in this volume follow the same structure: (1) an overview and discussion of national (and European) data and statistics on migration (the research project covers the period 2011-2017); (2) the discussion of the national socio- economic, political and cultural hosting societies, with special attention devoted to the migration history of the country; (3) the analysis of the constitutional organization of the state (in particular of the federal/regional/decentralised structure of the system of government that defines the tier of government responsible for the different dimensions of migration governance, and of the role of the judiciary, that may be relevant for the effective definition and entrenchment of fundamental rights) and of the eventual principles on immigration and asylum (with special attention to landmark constitutional case-law in the field of asylum); (4) the analysis of the legislative and institutional framework in the fields of immigration and asylum; (5) the critical discussion of foreigners’ legal status, with a focus on the acquisition of the status and of the connected rights and duties; (6) the illustration of eventual refugee crisis driven legislation and measures, and, finally, (7) a critical assessment of the compliance with the standards developed and crystallized at the supranational level.
Data for this research was collected through a combination of desk research of various sources (e.g. policy and legal documents, national and EU case law, research reports and scientific literature), information requests to relevant institutions, and semi-structured interviews with legal and policy experts and academics held during January and March 2018. The multidisciplinary approach of WP1 emerges from the structure, the content and the findings presented in the national reports: building on the analysis of the constitutional and legal framework, the research has enlarged the spectrum of the analysis and integrated the social sciences perspective with the discussion of data, societies’ cultural and social traits, and with the scrutiny of public policies and institutions. The findings of the present collection of national reports will be used in the development of a comparative report on the same topic and will contribute to unveiling the legal, political and socio-economic context of migration governance under Work package 1.
Each involved national team was responsible for its own domestic case, except the University of Florence, that covered also the European Union report, and Glasgow Caledonian University team that worked on the case of Hungary given the team’s expertise on the country. GCU was able to funnel external resources (in addition to the resources allocation established in the Grant Agreement) to work on this report.
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