Ukrainian refugees: can we believe in the European Union again?

Collapsed train stations and overcrowded land routes with people fleeing the horror of war are back in the headlines as a result of the (illegal) aggression against Ukraine by Russia led by Vladimir Putin and the support provided by Aleksandr Lukashenko's Belarus. The Old Continent is once again suffering the tragedy of refugees as a result of war, but this time everything seems to indicate that the European Union is up to the task. Barely a week after the Russian invasion began, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that more than a million people have crossed the Ukrainian border into neighbouring countries, mainly Poland, Romania, Hungary and Moldova - the latter a non-EU member state - and the UN has estimated that if the war drags on, more than seven million Ukrainians will leave the country in the coming weeks and four million people will move inland in search of shelter and protection. Dramatic figures that remind us of dark episodes in recent European history such as the two world wars, the conflicts in the Balkans or the arrival of Syrians fleeing the tragedy of the war that continues to ravage their country today. However, in all these crises, Europe's reaction of solidarity has not always been the same, but has varied depending on the moment, the nationality of the refugees or their religion.

Every war entails a humanitarian catastrophe and, as a result, the will of states - mainly European - has led to the creation of cooperation mechanisms to provide refuge for human beings who are victims of conflicts and political, social and religious persecution. As a result of this cooperation, a rich framework of legal protection has been developed for human beings who are victims of conflicts and seek refuge in other territories. Examples include the United Nations Charter and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that "in case of persecution, everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in any country the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum", and it is with this philosophy that the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees was signed in Geneva in 1951. This latter international treaty and its 1967 New York Additional Protocol - which broadens the grounds on which protection is granted and eliminates certain restrictions that appeared in the Geneva Convention - obliges the parties to provide shelter and protection to any human being who flees their territory because of a well-founded fear that his or her life and that of his or her family are in serious danger. 

The European Union goes further in the international legal protection of refugees, as is the case in other regions such as on the African continent with the Convention of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and in Latin America with the Cartagena Declaration. After the Balkan crisis, the European Union created a mechanism called the International Protection Directive, which has been in force since 2001 and has never been activated until now because it did not meet with the unanimous consensus of the member states. This directive allows protection in the EU for people from third countries who, as a result of a humanitarian disaster, are unable to return to their country of origin. Protection is granted for a period of one year and can be extended for three years. The European Parliament extended this protection by allowing the EU-27 to take in an unlimited number of refugees from third countries, in addition to providing health protection, education, accommodation and food while they are covered by the directive. European Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson announced that EU interior ministers had reached an agreement to activate this legal measure for the first time. 

These measures could have been activated as a consequence of the Syrian refugee crisis, however, in this case the European Union chose other procedures, more of an economic and political nature, such as the signing of outsourcing agreements with third countries, mainly Turkey, in order to ensure that this population does not reach European territory. It must be said that some states, such as Germany, as part of its domestic policy, took in a significant number of Syrian nationals, but we must also remember the lack of solidarity of other states, such as Hungary, Poland and Malta, which refused to provide the required protection or humanitarian assistance to human beings attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea. In this crisis, the voluntarism of some states took precedence over the will to activate mechanisms such as the International Protection Directive. 

Paradoxes of international life, the Putin-led military aggression against Ukraine is having unforeseen effects on European unity where, for the first time, member states have agreed to apply a protection framework for people fleeing war. The rift that emerged as a result of the (mis)so-called Syrian refugee crisis, which divided Eastern and Western states and deeply wounded the principle of European solidarity, now seems to be beginning to heal. For the first time in a long time, all European states have put aside their national interests and united in defence of the values and principles of the European Union, showing themselves to be a cohesive group in the face of the barbarity of the war unjustifiably initiated by Russia. This union can be seen in four areas where the European Union can act under the rule of unanimity: economic, with severe sanctions against Russian interests; political, in the total rejection of Russian aggression and unwavering support for the Kiev government; military, by activating the European Peace Support Fund authorising the delivery of defensive and offensive material to the Ukrainian armed forces and coordinating national policies; and solidarity, by indefinitely taking in Ukrainian refugees under an extended protection regime.  

So far, member states have shown their solidarity by agreeing to activate the Protection Directive and everything suggests that they will coordinate a system of quotas to share out the refugee population in solidarity among member states. This measure does not come too late and compliance with international law is always welcome, even if, as in this case, it is determined by a violation of international law and the commission of serious crimes against humanity by Russia and Belarus. Now it seems that the European Union is showing itself to be a guarantor of international solidarity. We can once again believe in the European Union, at least until the next crisis. 

José Miguel Calvillo Cisneros, Professor of International Relations at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid
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