The increased flow of asylum applicants and migrants to the EU in recent years has not only put considerable pressure on the reception systems of Member States, but at the same time raises challenges regarding the integration of newcomers at the national and local level.
Greetings and thanks for stopping by! My name is Shelly and the purpose of this blog is to document my experiences as a Masters student of the European Studies in Society, Sciences, and Technology Study programme (that's a mouthful so let's go with ESST!)
In today’s (15 september 2015) King’s speech the King said that the government will have as a point of departure for its presidency in 2016 of the Council of Ministers, a Europe which functions better and aims at essentials. Furthermore it will work towards an innovative Europe with a well...
I am sure you have heard that the Bulgarian government built a fence on the Bulgarian – Turkish border and that the ‘refugee crisis’ put the national asylum system to the test. What about the Bulgarian integration policies? Did you know that currently refugees in Bulgaria face ‘zero’ integration...
On September 9th 2015 the president of the Commission, Juncker, adressed for his first time the European Parliament in his State of the Union. This year’s State of the Union was entitled: Time for Honesty, Unity and Solidarity. And the key concepts were: more Europe in the Union, and more Union in...
Two prominent issues on the agenda of European equality lawyers have so far largely (although see recently CJ C-83/14 Nikolova) remained outside scrutiny of the Court of Justice of the European Union: discrimination on grounds of religion or belief and segregation of Roma. Recent developments may...
The 2015 Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) update highlights and confirms the shift towards a restrictive migration and integration policy in the Netherlands. Overall, the Netherlands dropped to the eleventh place in the MIPEX ranking, down from the fifth in 2010.
In a short memo, published on 22 March, the Dutch Liberal Party (VVD) expressed its view on how to handle the increasing number of asylum claims in the Netherlands, and more broadly in the EU, as well as the continuously tragic events concerning refugees that occur at the external borders of the EU...
