ASILE represents an advance in comparison to the current state of the art. It seeks to facilitate a ground-breaking understanding of the role and impacts of legal and policy responses – instruments and arrangements – on refugee protection and sharing of responsibility from the perspective of their effectiveness, fairness and consistency with international and regional legal and human rights and refugee law standards. It will do so through an interdisciplinary examination and mapping of UN GCR actors1 and key policy and legal instruments on mobility and containment, and the impacts of vulnerability and status recognition assessments over individuals in search of international protection. The ASILE project will generate an international academic-policy dialogue and a robust scientific understanding of current and future global and EU asylum governance approaches within the scope of the UN GCR.

The UN GCR calls for more equitable and effective arrangements for responsibility sharing. It states that it is to be grounded in international refugee protection and international human rights instruments. The UN GCR places protection as an overall guide of application. The ASILE project will take the GCR guiding principles as points of departure.

The basic research question is:

What are the characteristics and impacts of emerging international systems and EU asylum governance regimes, and what are their policy implications for EU’s role in the implementation of the UN GCR?