Robust protection in the EU
Can states both protect many refugees and protect them with the right kind of disposition?
Providing refuge to those fleeing persecution is a complex issue that goes beyond simply meeting admission quotas. While focusing on numbers might seem like a fair solution, it can distract from the deeper moral responsibilities that states have to offer refuge unconditionally, without political or national interests influencing their decisions.
This section discusses how to balance the moral duty to robustly provide a safe haven with the practical constraints that might force us to allow shifting state preferences to play a role in deciding which refugees are admitted.
The provision of refuge to those fleeing persecution and danger is a complex matter that cannot be reduced to simply meeting admission quotas. While numerical targets for refugee admissions may seem like a straightforward way to ensure states are doing their fair share, an overemphasis on numbers risks obscuring the deeper moral issues at play.
A truly robust approach to refugee protection requires that states act from the right kinds of reasons – a genuine commitment to the duty to provide safe haven to all refugees, regardless of their country of origin or the political expediency of admitting them. The worry is that if a state’s willingness to accept refugees fluctuates based on domestic political preferences and perceptions of national interest, rather than an unwavering recognition of the moral claims of the forcibly displaced, then the protection provided to refugees becomes contingent and precarious.
A disposition to selectively protect only certain refugees undermines the very concept of refuge. However, in our non-ideal world, a commitment to the principle of robust refugee protection can run up against the hard reality of state non-compliance. If the only way to get some states to fulfil their duties is to allow them leeway in choosing which refugees to admit, we face a serious moral dilemma. Relaxing the demands of robustness may enable larger raw numbers of people to access refuge in the near term.
However, it also risks eroding the norm of impartial consideration and creating a two-tier system of refugee protection. Ultimately, I argue, the dilemma between refugee numbers and robustness has no fully satisfying solution – it is an unavoidable product of our current circumstances of injustice and non-compliance.
The best we can do is seek arrangements that ease this tension over time. This requires taking a nuanced, context-sensitive approach attuned to real-world constraints and trade-offs while still keeping sight of the moral lodestar of genuinely unconditional refuge for all who need it.
In his interesting new article, Dimitrios Efthymiou argues that the EU quota system places too much emphasis on the number of individuals protected, to the detriment of certain aspects of the quality of protection. To rectify this imbalance he proposes an account of “robust” refugee protection, whereby protection should be conceptualised as a “a rich good”, and he recommends that long-term policy planning “prioritise minimising concessions to robustness”.
My comments centre on some ambiguities in Efthymiou’s analysis. First, I invite Efthymiou to say more about what rich protection amounts to. Second, I suggest that decoupling richness from robustness could yield improvements in the conceptual clarity of the account, and discuss some implications of this decoupling for Efthymiou’s assessment of the EU quota system.