Abstract
Abstract This article assesses Temporary Protection (TP) in Europe in response to refugee crises. In 2001 the European Union (EU) adopted a Directive for TP to provide a regional response to a mass influx. It was considered that TP offered a double-win: addressing protection needs of asylum seekers, while enabling states to maintain control based on the understanding that asylum seekers would return home after a short period of stay. The Directive has been endorsed in UNHCR Guidelines on ‘Temporary Protection or Stay Arrangements’ (2014). Notwithstanding, the analysis in this article indicates that TP was a strategy that failed: it did not give states control nor promote solidarity between them. Failure explains its absence in the responses to the 2015–16 crisis. However, national forms of TP have re-emerged signalling efforts to re-assert control in the face of an enduring problem.
Highlights
The implementation of temporary protection, (‘Temporary Protection (TP)’), is strongly identified as a response to large-scale movement, ‘influxes’, of people fleeing conflict and violence
It was considered that TP offered a double-win: addressing protection needs of asylum seekers, while enabling states to maintain control based on the understanding that asylum seekers would return home after a short period of stay
Those who called for TP during the 2015-16 European crisis, did so because they considered that it would help address the pressures on asylum systems, or they considered unrealistically that it could be a mechanism to minimize the burdens on European states
Summary
The implementation of temporary protection, (‘TP’), is strongly identified as a response to large-scale movement, ‘influxes’, of people fleeing conflict and violence. The 1990s was given the epithet of ‘the decade of repatriation’,4 and the repatriation of many Bosnians during 1996-8 following withdrawal of TP, fits within the timeline and the narrative Another vindication is that the critics of TP were won over by its pragmatism, and, through the EU, states accepted the need for common standards and rights by adopting the Temporary Protection Directive.[5]. The EU can fairly be considered in a number of contexts, including in relation to asylum, as a representation of a ‘Europe’ wider than the twenty-eight states which constitute its membership.[15] The influxes in 2015-16 are a case in point: given the clear preference for the vast majority of asylum seekers in Europe to seek protection within the EU, the EU has understandably been the focus of what has been commonly described as ‘Europe’s’ crisis
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