The New Pact on Migration and Asylum: What it is Not and What it Could Have Been

Abstract

After the failure of the Agenda for Migration of 2015 and in particular the impossibility to introduce solidarity in the Dublin system allocating responsibility to Member States for the examination of asylum applications, so much hope has been put into the New Pact on Migration and Asylum that it can be paradoxically better understood by analysing what it is not. Regarding the format, it is not a programmatic document paving the way for the development of migration and asylum policies in the future (1); Regarding the content, it is not a document trying to establish a consensus about the orientations of those controversial policies (2). The question is then what it could have been (3).