March 2, 2016 Europe Publication

Europe's migration challenges: mounting an effective health system response

Health systems are at the forefront of the response to the ongoing humanitarian crisis facing refugees and other migrants fleeing to Europe, both as a first point of contact for arrivals and later during their resettlement and beyond. (The term ‘migrant’ is used here with the understanding that there are numerous groups that fall within this categorization, but which are distinct in terms of their status, e.g. asylum-seeker, refugee, undocumented migrant, economic migrant, family-reunited migrant, etc., where a specific group is mentioned by name, it is in a context where this specificity is required.) Yet even if the scale of migration is new, at least in the post-war period, some European countries have considerable experience of sudden large-scale immigration, whether from Algeria to France in the 1960s, East African Asians coming to the United Kingdom in the 1970s, refugees from former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and, more recently, across ...

March 2, 2016 Europe Publication

Europe’s response to the refugee crisis: why relocation quotas will fail to achieve ‘fairness’ from a health perspective

EU refugee law is deficient—this has become obvious as thousands of refugees cross the Mediterranean and EU borders to reach a safe destination. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel calls for a scheme of compulsory relocation of refugees to EU member states to achieve a ‘fair’ distribution¹based on ‘objective, quantifiable and verifiable criteria’ such as GDP, population size and unemployment rates.² While we strongly believe that providing international protection to refugees is a collective duty of EU member states, we argue that the concept of their ‘fair’ (but factually enforced) relocation across the EU is flawed and may ultimately be detrimental from a public health perspective.