An urgently needed reform of the European migration and asylum system has been pending for years. However, the reform of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) adopted by the EU institutions in April 2024 hardly provides for any improvements for people seeking protection at the EU's external borders and inside the Union. On the contrary, a further deterioration must be assumed. Due to the growing complexity of the issue, sustainable and agile solutions for a human rights-based asylum and migration policy are needed. We see ourselves as an incubator for innovative approaches to EU migration policy and offer a platform for collaborative processes and projects.
Europe urgently needs a medium- and long-term strategy that treats the arrival of protection seekers and migrants not as a crisis but as an opportunity and prioritizes the protection of fundamental rights. People are still dying as they flee to Europe or are forced to endure degrading conditions at the EU's external borders. Current compromises between states, such as those on which the current reform of the Common European Asylum System is based, are characterised by deterrence and isolation and do not offer a sustainable and human rights-based solution. Instead, they lead to an erosion of international legal standards and the rights of migrants and refugees in the EU.
We do not see immigration and flight as a threat, but as a humanitarian task as well as a political opportunity and want to give new impetus to European migration and asylum policy. By tackling challenges pragmatically, responsibly and in a spirit of solidarity, we are developing new ambitious concepts and projects for safe migration and escape routes into the European Union that benefit both protection seekers and migrants as well as local actors. For this purpose, we also use data-based, innovative tools such as algorithms. Our proposed solutions are oriented towards the medium and long term and aim to bring about a change in thinking.
We see ourselves as a platform that brings together various stakeholders on the topic of municipal reception and integration in order to translate theory into practice across Europe. To this end, we support the networking of European municipalities in order to strengthen their visibility for EU decision-makers and their political voice. In addition, we actively support the development of strategic partnerships between municipal networks and transnational civil society initiatives, in particular the International Alliance of Safe Harbours (IASH) and the network "From The Sea To The City" (FSTC)with our expertise and pioneering ideas.
In recent years, more and more European cities and municipalities have declared their willingness to proactively take in people seeking protection. These progressive municipalities stand for a Europe of solidarity that respects human rights and takes responsibility for the protection of human lives. These municipalities can make an important contribution to overcoming migration policy challenges. As a platform, we therefore pursue a participatory municipal approach to asylum and migration policy.
We propose a governance concept that focuses on the direct relocation of people seeking protection from the EU's external borders to welcoming European municipalities. An algorithm-based matching process can play a central role here in order to match the needs of protection seekers with the offers of the welcoming municipalities and to bring them into the best possible agreement. We have been successfully testing this concept for pragmatic and participatory EU relocation in the Re:Match pilot project since 2022 Re:Match pilot project and are developing concrete learnings and proposals for replication, adaptation and scaling. We are convinced that practice-based projects can strengthen constructive policy proposals through their learning-by-doing dynamic and thus contribute to versatile and sustainable improvements in migration governance.
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Do you have any questions, suggestions or ideas for follow-up projects? Please feel free to contact us: migration[at]governance-platform.org
