Safe Pathways to Protection for Displaced Populations in Canada and Europe

forthcoming

ESCAPES studies national and international responses to forced displacement from a comparative perspective. The project seeks to advance existing understandings of the policy, legal and institutional factors shaping states’ use (or non-use) of so-called ‘active refugee admission policies’ – resettlement and complementary pathways for admission of refugees to third countries – and to explore a set of normative issues raised by existing policies and practices. The project will achieve the above-mentioned aim through an interdisciplinary and multi-method examination of refugee admission policies adopted by Canada and a selected group of EU Member States (Germany, Italy and Sweden) in response to three large-scale displacement situations: the Syrian situation (2011 onwards), the Afghanistan situation (2021 onwards) and the Ukrainian situation (2022 onward). The project starts from the recognition that States’ responses to the above-mentioned situations have displayed significant differences in terms of numbers of people admitted, admission instruments and procedures, and the rights granted to beneficiaries upon arrival. Against this background, ESCAPES has the following main objectives: a) develop an innovative conceptual framework to shed light on the dynamics of national and international policy-making in the field of resettlement and complementary pathways, and explain variation in states’ responses to different refugee situations; b) contribute to the nascent literature on the role that refugee agency and autonomy (should) play in accessing and navigating refugee admission instruments; c) expand existing scholarship on a set of normative issues raised by resettlement and complementary pathways’ policies and practices, paying specific attention to aspects of equity and non-discrimination, procedural fairness, and access to rights.