EU’S protection of Ukrainians offers future asylum lessons

Russia’s war on Ukraine last year sparked the biggest refugee crisis in Europe since World War Two, but also a wave of solidarity as thousands opened their homes to Ukrainians and EU states gave them rights and benefits akin to their own citizens.

The European Union swiftly granted temporary protection to millions of fleeing Ukrainians, giving them immediate rights to work and access to education, healthcare, welfare and housing, almost the same as local nationals.

Their treatment is in stark contrast to that received by refugees from other warzones, but could provide lessons in how to deal with the contentious issue.

“Temporary protection has been the sleeping beauty of the European asylum legislation,” Sara Consolato, an immigration expert with nongovernmental organisation Refugees Welcome Italy, said. “The decision to activate, for the first time since its adoption, has been ground-breaking,” she said.

The EU’S never-before-used 2001 Temporary Protection Directive aims to fast-track residency rights by waiving the need to examine applications individually and so avoid major bottlenecks and the possible collapse of asylum systems under the pressure of a mass movement of refugees.

But the measure, while largely hailed as a success, has created a two-tier system, refugee advocates say, in which non-ukrainian refugees undergo a lengthy asylum application process and endure conditions that often appear designed to deter them from coming to the EU.

Asylum is provided to those not just fleeing war, but also to those experiencing persecution, but that is harder to prove and often leads to lengthy scrutiny. While asylum regimes differ greatly across the EU, what they have in common is curtailing the rights of applicants for months and sometimes years while their claims are assessed.

The EU had considered triggering the directive before. Italy and Malta called for it in 2011 when almost 2 million people were displaced as a result of the Arab Spring uprisings.

In 2021, EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell suggested temporary protection be applied to Afghans fleeing the Taliban takeover of their country. But some EU countries argued activating temporary protection in these cases might attract more migrants to Europe. It was also hard for EU leaders to agree to trigger the directive when the influx affected some countries and not the bloc as a whole. —