The project aims to carry out an in-depth legal analysis of the scenarios that are available to Denmark in relation to the EU collaboration on asylum, border control and the deportation of foreigners. The project thereby creates an informed basis for the political decision-making process on these topics.

The current EU rules on asylum and border control are not working. This has been obvious since more than 1 million asylum seekers and migrants crossed the Union’s external borders in 2015. Since the beginning of 2016, the EU member states have therefore been negotiating a reform of these rules, and the negotiations are now in the final stages. Regardless of the outcome, it is a given that Danish politicians must make a number of tough decisions in coming years about Denmark’s future participation in the EU collaboration on asylum, border control and the deportation of foreigners. This is because Denmark - along with a number of other member states - has increasingly begun taking their own initiatives to compensate for the inefficiency of the EU rules. Many of these initiatives have been introduced on an uninformed legal basis and are therefore at odds with EU law or human rights. One example is the Danish border control. Another example is the proposal of establishing exit centres outside of EU’s borders, which the governments in Denmark and Austria are preparing in collaboration.

“The current regulations are outdated as they fail to consider the current challenges that follow from the pressure on EU’s external borders and the inability to send back large groups of people whose residence permits in the EU have been rejected,” says Louise Halle Storgaard when explaining the background for the upcoming work.

The Independent Research Fund Denmark awards grants to research projects that contribute to producing groundbreaking research within all academic fields and to solving societal challenges. Louise Halleskov Storgaard from the Department of Law is one of several grant recipients from Aarhus BSS.

Read more about the Aarhus BSS grants from the Independent Research Fund Denmark and the fund itself.

  Read the Independent Research Fund Denmark’s press release about this year’s grants.