The sociologist Ruud Koopmans welcomes the proposal from the CDU to replace the individual right to asylum as the main pillar of refugee policy with an institutional guarantee – after all, the proposal takes up central ideas from Koopmans. However, the expert considers the complete abolition of the individual basic right to asylum to be unnecessary and wrong. This would pose such great hurdles “that the entire proposal would come to nothing”.
ntv.de: The CDU politician Thorsten Frei has in the FAZ called for the abolition of the individual right to asylum. What do you think of the proposal?
Ruud Koopmans: I recognized a lot from my book in the arguments presented there.
Ruud Koopmans teaches sociology and migration research at the Humboldt University in Berlin and is a department director at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB).
(Photo: picture alliance / Geisler-Fotopress)
“The Asylum Lottery”, in which you call the European asylum system “deadly ill”.
Above all, I share the basic idea that we have to change course from individual granting of asylum to quota admissions – that’s exactly what I’m proposing. Also the idea of implementing this with an institute guarantee: Then it becomes clear that the EU has a binding promise to take in a quota of refugees every year, the amount of which does not have to be renegotiated again and again. I don’t think the proposal to completely abolish the individual’s basic right to asylum is so good. I don’t think that’s necessary either.
Why wouldn’t that be necessary? Would it be possible to maintain a quota if there was also an individual right to asylum?
Yes. However, one would have to try to limit the number of people who can make use of their individual right to asylum through agreements with third countries. Because otherwise people would still make their way, for example from Tunisia to Italy. For them we would need agreements with third countries, for example with Tunisia, in order to return these people. One can then also agree with these countries that asylum seekers are given the opportunity to submit an application there and thus be able to exercise their right to protection outside the EU. This could reduce irregular migration without abolishing individual fundamental rights.
Would it even be possible to abolish the fundamental right to asylum?
For Germany, this would mean that the Basic Law would have to be changed. There are high hurdles for that, it won’t happen that easily. It would also mean that we would have to amend or even repeal the Geneva Refugee Convention. That wouldn’t be easy either. There is also the European Convention on Human Rights, which would also have to be changed. All of these are such big hurdles that the entire proposal would come to nothing.
At the moment, the basic right of asylum can in practice only be claimed by people who enter Germany irregularly. Is not that a contradiction?
No, there is no contradiction. The basic right to asylum or the right to protection, as guaranteed in the Geneva Refugee Convention, applies regardless of how you enter the country. It doesn’t matter whether someone has a visa or not, or even comes without any identification documents at all.
What do you think of the EU’s agreements with Tunisia? The model was apparently the EU-Turkey agreement of 2016. But there were no reports from Turkey that security forces were taking migrants into the desert to leave them to their own devices.
You have to wait and see what exactly is in this agreement, because a lot is still unclear. And secondly, it always depends on how such an agreement is implemented. The question would be what guarantees Tunisia would offer that people could apply for asylum there, or for some other form of protection from persecution or war. I don’t think it will involve many people, because most of the people who come to Europe via Tunisia do not come from wartime or persecution states. But there will be a group for which this is true. For this we need an agreement that is compatible with international refugee law. Mechanisms would also have to be agreed in it that would enable the EU to check compliance with the conditions.
Thorsten Frei speaks of an annual contingent of 300,000 or 400,000 people in need of protection that Europe could take in. Do you think that is a realistic figure?
Yes, that is a realistic figure. In my book, I think I mention the figure of 325,000 people to be admitted. That is the average number of people in need of protection that we in Europe took in each year in the ten years before the Ukraine war. I also think it’s a good idea in terms of the political feasibility of such a proposal, because it makes it clear that it’s not about helping fewer people, but about helping in a different way. For Germany, that would mean around 160,000 refugees per year.
Would the fair distribution in Europe that has been sought for years be possible?
I wouldn’t even strive for that! It has long since been shown that this is a completely utopian idea. I think such quotas should be worked out with self-commitments by a coalition of the willing within the EU. If all countries that have taken in many refugees in the past take part, then the problem would be settled. And these are also the countries that have an interest in switching to quotas. If this system works well, countries like Poland and Hungary could also be willing to join at some point.
According to Frei’s proposal, there would be a kind of special right for people from the EU’s immediate neighbors, whose admission should be counted against the total quota: “If there were a mass influx, as is currently the case in Ukraine, Europe would not be able to take a quota from the EU for a longer period of time absorb more abroad.”
I also suggest that in my book. I think it is legitimate to treat people from countries directly neighboring the EU differently, because that is precisely the group of refugees for whom refugee law was created: it was created so that the situation before World War II would not repeat itself, as German Jews were rejected by Germany’s neighboring countries. So it’s only realistic to say that the quotas pause in times of particular stress – for example in years like 2022, when Germany took in one million Ukrainians. Of course, as a continent that is still rich, Europe still has a responsibility for refugees in other parts of the world. That means that even in such years Europe could help countries like Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon or Bangladesh to take in refugees – but financially or by expanding our support for the UN refugee agency UNHCR, which is very badly underfunded.
Hubertus Volmer spoke to Ruud Koopmans