Convenors: Matthias Hoesch (Münster), Anna Lübbe (Fulda), Andreas Niederberger (Duisburg), Dana Schmalz (Heidelberg/Jena)

n the European Union, responsibility sharing in refugee protection is organized through supranational regulations. This fact raises several important questions: What kind of regulations are necessary to ensure fairness for each of the states? What conditions are necessary to ensure that responsibility sharing among states is also fair to refugees? How should the EU behave towards third countries and refugees living in third countries? These questions are reflected in the current controversies about the reform of the Dublin Regulation and the events at the external frontiers.

In the Cooperation Group Normative Challenges of the European Asylum System, lawyers, philosophers and political scientists investigate different patterns of responsibility sharing in refugee protection. Their main questions are: which patterns are conceivable for Europe, and how are they to be evaluated normatively? To this end, the cooperation group employs normative standards of three kinds: legal standards – in particular the basic and human rights law and EU constitutional requirements -, as well as philosophical standards of justice and political standards of democratic theory.