Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 5 • Giuseppe De Sario, Laura Corradi, Patricia Ruiz, Enrica Capussotti
Article 8: Where no Member State responsible for examining the application
for asylum can be designated on the basis of the other
criteria listed in this Convention, the first Member State with
which the application for asylum is lodged shall be responsible
for examining it.
Article 4: Where the applicant for asylum has a member of his family who
has been recognized as having refugee status within of the
Geneva Convention, as amended by the New York Protocol, in
a Member State and is legally resident there, that State shall be
responsible for examining the application, provided that the
persons concerned so desire. The family member in question
may not be other than the spouse of the applicant for asylum or
his or her unmarried child who is a minor of under eighteen
years, or his or her father or mother where the applicant for
asylum is himself or herself an unmarried child who is a minor
of under eighteen years.
These rules were decided upon and signed by the States that were part of
the European Union (EU) in 1990. Because of these rules, the European
States such as Spain, Greece and Italy that border non-European
Community countries will be made responsible for the majority of
European asylum requests. Though this treaty was ratified on the 15 July
1990, there have been considerable delays in its application: after the war
in Bosnia, for instance, the bulk of the Balkan exiles were absorbed by the
northern European nations.
From the interviews, we found that the Kosovars had emigrated mostly for
work-related reasons. The Serbian repression of Kosovar Albanians and
Romany included a campaign of firing employees. Non-Serbian workers
were randomly dismissed from their factories and public jobs until, left
without employment, the men finally left their families in Kosovo, settling
in countries where they could work and send money back home.
Often, the strategy of modern émigrés consists of settling in a country
where a like-community was already long established. The profile of “the
typical migrant” has come to resemble a person arriving in a specific location
to work along with other members of his own community, and who
already has relatives settled in the new country. Since 1998, however,
when violence had almost become an everyday event, the Apollonian
Coast began to see the arrival of these migrants from Kosovo, primarily
Albanian and Romany, most without legal documentation. According to
the traditional logic of past migrations, many of these people should have
gone to countries where communities were already present to welcome
them, but the Dublin Convention stood between them and their goal.
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