Secondary Movements: Overcoming the Lack of Trust among the EU Member States?
This article was contributed by Dr. Daniel Thym, Co-Director of the Research Centre of Immigration and Asylum Law at the University of Konstanz. It was originally published by the Immigration and Asylum Law and Policy Blog on 29 October 2020.
Trust is an essential prerequisite for a functioning area of freedom, security and justice – as the Court of Justice coined it so well: “At issue here is the raison d’être of the European Union and the creation of …, in particular, the Common European Asylum System, based on mutual confidence.” Our theme is not the controversial case law on fundamental rights, which judges dealt with when emphasizing the relevance of mutual trust, but the more generic question of how countries in northern and southern Europe interact when asylum seekers take advantage of the border-free Schengen area to relocate themselves autonomously.
That phenomenon is usually referred to as “secondary movements,” even though the Commission evades the term in the “pact,” which nevertheless referred to the issue indirectly in the title of the accompanying press release with its call for a “balance between responsibility and solidarity.” When it comes to policy debates among the Member States in the Council, enhanced rules on relocation (solidarity) and the prevention of secondary movements (responsibility) are two sides of the same coin. [Read more here.]
