Europe is a popular destination for LGBTQ people seeking to escape discrimination and persecution. Yet, while European institutions have done much to promote the legal equality of sexual minorities ...and a number of states pride themselves on their acceptance of sexual diversity, the image of European tolerance and the reality faced by LGBTQ migrants and asylum seekers are often quite different. To engage with these conflicting discourses, Queer Migration and Asylum in Europe brings together scholars from politics, sociology, urban studies, anthropology and law to analyse how and why queer individuals migrate to or seek asylum in Europe, as well as the legal, social and political frameworks they are forced to navigate to feel at home or to regularise their status in the destination societies. The subjects covered include LGBTQ Latino migrants’ relationship with queer and diasporic spaces in London; diasporic consciousness of queer Polish, Russian and Brazilian migrants in Berlin; the role of the Council of Europe in shaping legal and policy frameworks relating to queer migration and asylum; the challenges facing bisexual asylum seekers; queer asylum and homonationalism in the Netherlands; and the role of space, faith and LGBTQ organisations in Germany, Italy, the UK and France in supporting queer asylum seekers.
This article deals with the modes of (contested) control that are at play at the Mediterranean frontier for containing, dividing and discipling unruly mobility. Building on ethnographic research ...conducted on the island of Lesvos and of Lampedusa, it focuses on the implementation and the functioning of the Hotspot System in Greece and in Italy, analysing beyond the fences of detention centres and by looking at the broader logistics of channels, infrastructures and governmental measures deployed for regaining control over migration movements. The article argues that more than control in terms of surveillance and tracking, the Hotspot System contributes to enforce forms of containment through mobility that consists in controlling migration by obstructing, decelerating and troubling migrants' geographies - more than in fully blocking them. The article takes into account migrants' refusals of being fingerprinted, showing how migrants radically unsettle the association between seeking refuge and lack of choice, enacting their right to choose where to go and claim asylum.
In the Hellenistic period certain Greek temples and cities came to
be declared "sacred and inviolable." Asylia was the
practice of declaring religious places precincts of asylum, meaning
they were ...immune to violence and civil authority. The evidence for
this phenomenon-mainly inscriptions and coins-is scattered in the
published record. The material has never been collected and
presented in one publication until now. Kent J. Rigsby lays out
these documents and discusses their historical implications in a
substantial introduction. He argues that while a hopeful intention
of military neutrality lay behind the institution of asylum, the
declarations did not in fact change military behavior. Instead,
"declared inviolability" became a civic and religious honor for
which cities across the Greek world competed during the third to
first centuries B.C.
Since the increase of refugee arrivals in 2015, the longstanding trend of using islands to confine asylum seekers at the EU borders became a prominent aspect of asylum governance. By looking at the ...southeastern border of the EU, as it has been constructed around the five Greek islands that host the EU's hotspot approach, I demonstrate the implications of the European governance of asylum on the individual right to seek asylum. In doing so, I argue that there is a newly introduced process of peripheralisation of asylum. Under the term peripheralisation I describe the multidimensional process of demotion or downgrading of a socio-spatial unit about other socio-spatial units, i.e. the Greek mainland and the northern EU member states. Although the externalisation of asylum, is key to understanding the impact of the right to asylum, peripheralisation provides the necessary conceptual tool to explain the new architecture of confinement inside the territory of the EU and on the southeastern border islands. The main contribution of the article is providing an understanding of how the right to asylum is also hampered within the EU through the peripheralisation of the islands and by the externalisation of Turkey.
Asylum policy in the European nation-states has been a subject of increasing influence form the European Union over the last 12 years since the call for the establishment of a Common European Asylum ...System. This article presents an assessment of the EU impact on the asylum policy outcomes in the 27 member states, Norway and Switzerland. The article focuses on three central hypotheses about the effects of Europeanization - a race to the bottom, convergence and burden sharing. Using aggregate and origin-specific asylum data for the period 1999-2010 provided by the UNHCR, we show that the increasing Europeanization of asylum policy has not resulted in a race to the bottom in which asylum recognition rates and the numbers of admitted refugees have eroded. Contrary to existing literature, we find some evidence for convergence of the overall asylum recognition rates but important national differences in the recognition of applicants from the same country of origin persist. Europeanization has not led to more equal distribution of the applications and recognitions of asylum status in Europe. Overall, the EU has had only a limited impact on the changes in asylum policy outcomes.
Accounts by those seeking asylum are often challenged by the Home Office (HO) because of apparent inconsistencies and lack of credibility. Yet the ability to disclose everything at initial interview ...can be impacted by many factors. This study explores how applicants experienced interviews with the HO and its effects. Semi-Structured interviews were conducted with eight participants who had been through the UK asylum process. Transcripts of interviews were analysed using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Four Superordinate themes were identified; "Confronted by a Hostile System", "Intra and Interpersonal Barriers at Interview", "Moments of Reprieve", "A Destructive Process". Participants identified experiences of a system that felt overtly and intentionally hostile. Psychological, practical and institutional factors were identified as affecting what they were able to disclose. Participants identified deterioration to their mental health because of the experience, which for some was not alleviated once leave to remain was granted.
Despite elevated rates of psychological disorders amongst individuals from a refugee background, levels of mental health help-seeking in these populations are low. There is an urgent need to ...understand the key barriers that prevent refugees and asylum-seekers from accessing help for psychological symptoms. This review synthesises literature examining perceptions of mental health and barriers to mental health help-seeking in individuals from a refugee background. Our analysis, which complies with PRISMA reporting guidelines, identified 62 relevant studies. Data extraction and thematic analytic techniques were used to synthesise findings from quantitative (n = 26) and qualitative (n = 40) studies. We found that the salient barriers to help-seeking were: (a) cultural barriers, including mental health stigma and knowledge of dominant models of mental health; (b) structural barriers, including financial strain, language proficiency, unstable accommodation, and a lack of understanding of how to access services, and (c) barriers specific to the refugee experience, including immigration status, a lack of trust in authority figures and concerns about confidentiality. We discuss and contextualise these key themes and consider how these findings can inform the development of policies and programs to increase treatment uptake and ultimately reduce the mental health burden amongst refugees and asylum-seekers.
•Mental health stigma was a cultural barrier to help-seeking.•Mental health literacy was a cultural barrier to help-seeking.•Financial strain, language ability and unstable housing were structural barriers.•A lack of understanding of how to access services was a structural barrier.•Immigration status and a lack of trust are barriers relevant for refugees.
Italy has recently been one of the main entry points for asylum seekers and refugees into Europe (UNHCR 2023). Credibility assessment of claims in asylum procedures heavily hinges on the applicants’ ...ability to (re)construct their refugee identity in written declarations and oral testimonies, which are in turn shaped and reshaped within the interaction in the further course of the procedure, not only but also by interpreters. Over the past 30 years, a growing number of publications testifies to the importance of asylum interpreters’ roles and ethics and show that asylum interpreters rarely fulfil the expectations of normative role prescriptions. This paper aims to gain a better understanding of some critical aspects of interpreting in the asylum context in Italy, an understudied area of interpreting so far, mainly for difficult access to data. It is based on a combination of participant observation, semi-structured interviews to some of the participants in the hearings and documentation about our dataset, which was collected at a Prefecture in central Italy in 2023. After an overview of the normative aspects of the right to asylum in the world and, more specifically, in Italy, we discuss the main issues concerning the complex profile and role of asylum interpreters and provide a description of the Italian international protection system. We then contextualise the dataset and the linguistic-ethnographic methods adopted to unravel the complex interactional dynamics under investigation. Based on our data analysis, we conclude that, in order to provide quality services, more specialised interpreter training is needed – not only in terms of language, legal knowledge and terminology, intercultural and communication skills, but also in terms of interviewing techniques and interactional mechanisms, as well as awareness of roles and respective boundaries in the asylum hearing.
Highlights•Refugees and asylum seekers in Europe experience high mental health needs. •This population exhibits low contact coverage of specialist MHPSS services. •This population presents more ...frequently with physical health complaints. •Barriers to access include: language, stigma, low awareness, and variant help-seeking behaviours.
•Longer asylum processing time decreases earnings and employment among refugees.•Waiting slows down entry to language training and labor market programs.•The impact is due to delay, not to human ...capital effects of waiting per se.•The study finds no evidence of deteriorating health due to longer waiting.
We study labor market and health implications of asylum wait time, a policy margin with bearing on public finances. The analysis exploits a rapid and unexpected increase in pending applications, which extended processing times with several months for new asylum seekers to Sweden. Longer waiting slows down integration by delaying labor market entry and decreasing participation and performance in active policy measures. Accumulated earnings during the first four years after application are 2.6 percent lower per added month of waiting. The impact is due to delay, not to negative human capital effects of waiting per se. There is no evidence of detrimental effects on psychiatric or other forms of health. Importantly, our results suggest that asylum seekers in Sweden can use the waiting time for useful preparations. The analysis consistently indicates that case workers, teachers and employers involved in post-asylum integration measures perceive individuals who have waited longer as more prepared.
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