| Description |
Since 2015, migration towards and within Europe has created a ‘stress’ in the EU asylum and migration systems, challenging the adequacy of the legal design of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). This impacted the implementation of both the CEAS and national asylum systems in practice and called its further harmonisation into question. The notion of harmonisation is not a fixed term, but rather incorporates varied meanings and practices. While in legal terms, harmonisation has been explained as an approximation process towards minimum standards, harmonisation in political terms rather focuses on policy convergence, of which the harmonisation of legal regimes is only one among many mechanisms of convergence. Taking these varied meanings into account, CEASEVAL will carry out a comprehensive evaluation of the CEAS in terms of its framework and practice. It will make an analysis of harmonisation which goes beyond the formal institutional setting and takes into account the complex relations among the actors engaged from the local and the national levels, to the European level, in order to explain the success and the failure of coordinated action between these varied actors. CEASEVAL will innovatively 1) combine multiple disciplines in order to explore different perspectives of the CEAS, 2) develop a new theoretical framework of multilevel governance of the CEAS, which will be empirically tested across several EU Member States and third countries, 3) provide a critical evaluation of the CEAS by identifying and analysing discrepancies in the transposition and incorporation of European standards in the area of asylum in domestic legislation, as well as differences in their implementation, and 4) elaborate new policies by constructing different alternatives of implementing a common European asylum system. On this basis, CEASEVAL will determine which kind of harmonisation (legislative, implementation, etc.) and solidarity is possible and necessary.
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