Daniela Vitiello

Over the past decade, collective responsibility towards refugees has migrated from rhetorical aspiration to apparent policy commitment (Mavropoulou, 2025; Capicchiano Young, 2025; Hurwitz, 2009). The 2016 New York Declaration, along with the subsequent UN Global Compacts on Refugees (GCR) and on Migration (GCM), established the pursuit of durable solutions as a shared international obligation, catalysing the proliferation of resettlement and complementary pathway schemes across jurisdictions as disparate as Canada, Argentina, Australia, and the European Union (UNHCR, 2021).
Yet, from the perspective of international law, this proliferation has occurred in a normative vacuum: absent any binding (or even soft law) framework to operationalise legal pathways at an international (or regional) level, such mechanisms have developed within a fragmented and patchy legal environment, which has impacted their potential as a collective response to protracted displacement (Vitiello, Guild, Berneri, 2025). On the one hand, genuinely promising models have emerged over time; Canada’s private sponsorship system is the most frequently cited example and will be discussed by Luca Galli in an upcoming blog post on this journal. On the other hand, the lack of a solid and shared legal foundation has led to asymmetry between domestic solutions and, more worryingly, legal pathways being quietly repurposed as a tool of migration control rather than protection. Argentina’s case (to be discussed further by Marilù Porchia in an upcoming blog post on this journal) is, in many ways, a case study of this very risk.
The European Union’s own trajectory illustrates this tension with particular clarity (Ketelaar-Jones, Welfens, Wood, 2025). Since 2000, the Commission has periodically suggested a “common approach” to resettlement but has then backed down in the face of resistance from Member States to binding commitments. Although a 2003 feasibility study by van Selm et al. concluded that harmonisation was both necessary and strategically desirable, he subsequent 2009 Joint EU Resettlement Programme remained purely discretionary, and by that time only ten Member States were operating regular schemes. It was only in the aftermath of the Syrian refugee crisis that the Commission returned, via the 2015 Recommendation on a European resettlement scheme, to language of a common architecture – while simultaneously recasting resettlement as not simply a complement to asylum, but as the preferred route into Europe: one that should not be “duplicated” by spontaneous asylum claims (Savino, 2019). This discursive shift prefigures much of what follows.
The clearest illustration of this shift is the 2016 EU-Turkey Statement and its “one-to-one” resettlement mechanism: for every Syrian refugee returned from Greece to Turkey after an irregular crossing, one Syrian refugee who had remained in Turkey and not attempted the journey would be resettled in the EU. Significantly, the quotas mobilised to implement the scheme were not new commitments, but existing allocations originally intended for intra-EU relocation under Article 78(3) TFEU, which were redirected after Hungary refused to participate. Thus, what began as an internal solidarity mechanism among Member States was thus turned into a mechanism of “disguised externalisation”, projecting the burden-sharing logic of Article 80 TFEU onto a third country (Vitiello, 2018).
On paper, this appeared to be a tool of solidarity, sharing the responsibility with a country hosting millions of refugees. In practice, however, it made lawful resettlement conditional upon the return of 'irregular' arrivals, effectively punishing individuals for the manner in which they sought protection rather than assessing their protection needs (Bamberg, 2018; Moreno-Lax, 2022). This discriminatory, nationality-based approach conflicted with Article 3 of the 1951 Refugee Convention and the established principle of non-penalisation for irregular entry (Goodwin-Gill, 2003). Nevertheless, the EU-Turkey Statement has been used as a blueprint to normalise the idea that access to asylum can be legitimately shaped by border management considerations, turning resettlement into a device of “deterrence disguised as solidarity” (Vitiello, 2020).
The Union Resettlement and Humanitarian Admission Framework, adopted in 2024 through Regulation (EU) 2024/1350, is the most sustained attempt yet to balance this approach with the goal of expanding the “protection space” for refugees in Europe (Bratanova van Harten, 2023). First, the final version of Reg. (EU) 2024/1350 abandons the conditionality-based approach to cooperation with third countries. This makes the link between legal pathways and the fight against irregular migration less cogent compared to the original proposal (Art. 4(d)). Secondly, it extends the scope of protection beyond resettlement to include humanitarian and emergency admission and firmly incorporates Reg. (EU) 2024/1350 within the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). Consequently, resettlement and humanitarian admission are aligned with the constitutional framework of EU asylum law, meaning they cannot be repurposed as migration or security tools, nor as an alternative to territorial asylum (Ziebritzki, 2020). Thirdly, the new regulation introduces common definitions of resettlement, humanitarian and emergency admission, harmonised eligibility criteria, and a biennial Resettlement and Humanitarian Admission Plan, which reduce the margin of procedural autonomy of the Member States when implementing these legal pathways.
At the same time, the voluntary nature of resettlement and humanitarian admission is entrenched rather than dislodged (Loxa, 2023). The Regulation expressly disclaims any subjective right to admission and any corresponding obligation on Member States (Recital 25); quotas remain wholly voluntary; procedural deadlines carry no sanction for non-compliance; and Member States retain the discretion to exclude applicants whose vulnerability exceeds their asserted capacity to provide adequate support – a provision that inverts resettlement’s protective rationale by permitting exclusion precisely on the ground of acute need Furthermore, domestic selection practices that privilege the so-called “integration potential” are formally codified (Art. 9(2)), favouring integration-oriented over protection-oriented approaches to refugee selection. Compounding this, as part of the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, the Regulation should contribute to a “seamless border migration process” (Tsourdi, 2024), which is governed by the overarching commitment to increase returns and curb secondary movements. The Commission has been fairly explicit about the conceptual imbrication of protection and removal, stating in a January 2023 policy document (COM(2023) 45 final) that “an effective and common EU system for returns […] can promote safe legal pathways”. Read alongside the externalisation of solidarity and the emerging skills-based approach to humanitarian admission described above, Reg. (EU) 2024/1350 appears to be more of a consolidation of the EU-Turkey model into EU secondary law than a break from it.
Complementary pathways and “community sponsorship” occupy a more ambiguous position within this architecture. They became popular in the aftermath of the so-called Syrian refugee “crisis” of 2015 as a legal avenue of access, additional to resettlement and alternative to practices of outsourcing asylum responsibilities to third countries (Stefańska, Grzymała‑Kazłowska, Wach, 2025). Streamlining their implementation is one of the goals set forth by the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, which put forward the idea of establishing a common EU reference framework for sponsorship-based legal pathways in order to mitigate the fragmentation of national schemes while upholding the inherent flexibility of these mobility tools (Commission Recommendation (EU) 2020/1364). Additionally, the EUAA’s November 2024 Guidelines catalogue a variety of national models, including state-led schemes in Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, civil society-led humanitarian corridors in Italy, France, and Belgium, and family-based pathways elsewhere.
Despite their differences in terms of targets and goals, all sponsorship-based schemes in Europe share a common structural feature: the involvement of private and community actors in functions that are traditionally the responsibility of state authorities in the areas of refugee admission and integration. Furthermore, community sponsorship is not considered an autonomous legal pathway, nor is it based on humanitarian visas as a protected entry procedure under EU law. Instead, it aims to establish a link between legal admission and subsequent reception and integration phases, redefining civic engagement as an active process of migrant/refugee re-subjectification. During the so-called Ukrainian “crisis” of 2022, which triggered the activation of temporary protection (Carrera, Ineli Ciger, 2023; Fullerton, 2024), community support was also boosted to manage mass flows of displaced persons, with the creation of specific mechanisms at a European level to facilitate private involvement in the reception of Ukrainian refugees (see Joanna Markiewicz-Stanny’s forthcoming blog post on this journal).
Therefore, this pluriform and multifunctional protection tool has been rightly defined as “a powerful expression of European solidarity in action” (European Sponsorship Convention: 10 Years of Community Sponsorship in Europe). Yet, it remains anchored to voluntary national schemes and is regulated by soft law instruments that do not confer any protection status under EU law. Alongside substantial variation in eligibility, cost-sharing and the duration of support across schemes, this raises the same question of additionality that pervades resettlement more broadly: do these mechanisms genuinely expand protection capacity, or do they merely redistribute existing commitments under a more appealing, civic-branded label?
A comparative analysis of non-EU models suggests that the durability of such arrangements depends less on procedural innovation than on sustained institutional investment beyond the initial spirit of solidarity. In this sense, the New Pact represents genuine institutional progress, providing a shared legal vocabulary, harmonised procedures and a structured planning cycle, all of which were previously absent from EU practice. However, its normative architecture – comprising voluntary quotas, unenforceable deadlines, discretionary exclusion criteria and a persistent discursive coupling of resettlement with return policy – may perpetuate and exacerbate the traditional institutional blurring of protection and migration control objectives. Thus, for the time being, the development of a European approach to resettlement and community sponsorship appears to be caught in the not-so-constructive ambiguity of being a policy innovation in form but quietly serving an externalisation agenda in substance.

This blogpost is one of the scientific outcomes of the CoSME Project (www.cosmeproject.eu) in partnership with IntoME (www.intome.eu).