Abstract: This paper intends to give a brief summary about the conference called Visegrad Refugee Forum 2015, Budapest, organized by the Corvinus Society for Foreign Affairs and Culture. The organizers invited the representative of four different NGO’s from the Visegrad counries, namely the Euroatlantic Centre and the Institute for Public Affairs from Slovakia, the Organization for Aid to Refugees and the Multicultural Centre Prague from the Czech Republic and the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights from Poland. Beside the distinguished experts of these NGO’s, governmental institutions such the Ministry of Interior of Hungary and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Trade of Hungary were represented at the conference on 6-7 of July 2015.
Keywords: asylum policy, European Union, Visegrad Refugee Forum
Essay
Abstract: This essay highlights a few key considerations related to current developments in the field of immigration. It offers reflection on a recently published overview of Security Studies [Marton-Balogh-Rada: Biztonsági tanulmányok...; AJTK: Budapest, 2015], and the assessment therein of the challenges of migration, as a baseline of evaluation to be critically reviewed in light of recent events. Along with weaknesses of the present system of international burden-sharing related to refugee protection, the essay points out pros and cons as to whether a fundamental re-assessment of the situation is truly necessary, and concludes by asking some basic questions that ought to be answered before it is possible to strategically conceive of the road ahead.
Keywords: refugees, migrants, immigration, European Union
Abstract: This article analyses the impact of the recent migration crisis on forced migration to Poland, with a particular focus on the situation of Ukrainian asylum seekers. Contrary to predictions, very few Ukrainian nationals have applied for international protection in Poland since the beginning of the conflict in 2014. According to the analyses conducted by the Polish asylum authority, the majority of applicants come from conflict zones in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea. In spite of this fact, the recognition rate of their applications is very low which may in turn have an adverse effect on the number of people willing to seek asylum in Poland. The authors argue that this situation is a result of application of the concept of ’internal flight alternative’ to Ukrainian cases without a genuine assessment of individual situation of each asylum seeker. Contrarily to the information contained in recent international reports, Polish authorities take as a general rule that civilians fleeing Eastern Ukraine can, as internally displaced persons, relocate safely in other parts of the country. Other persisting human rights concerns and deficiencies of Polish reception system, in particular the amount of social aid offered to asylum seekers and lack of the system of identification of vulnerable groups, may further deter Ukrainians from seeking asylum in Poland.
Keywords: Poland, immigration, Ukrainian asylumseekers
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to analyse and evaluate the current asylum trends in the Czech Republic. The focus is mostly on the grounds why the asylum-seekers have been applying for international protection, from which countries of origin they flee, when there were major asylum waves and what influenced them at the national and EU levels. The Czech case will be presented in a historical and partly comparative V4 perspective. The historical overview will focus on the building of the asylum system of the 1990s and the subsequent period of “Europeanization.” Because this complex understanding might lead to the conclusions that there are more similarities with the historical asylum trends than it is obvious at first sight. There might be also interesting conclusions that asylum trends might differentiate from other V4 countries, not to say the whole Europe with regard to the current wave of asylum-applications in each of the EU Member States.
Keywords: asylum-seekers, V4 countries, Dublin Regulation, abuses of human rights, war conflict, economic migrants