 Thank you very much, dear Mrs. Minen, dear guests, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for inviting me to this interesting exchange of ideas and I look forward to a lively debate with you all. Now with regard to the topic, although refugee and asylum policies have been repeatedly at the top of the European Union's agenda for over 15 years now, it never carried as much political weight as in 2015 and 2016 when over a million people suddenly entered the EU member states. And in late 2015 the so-called refugee crisis, which I think should better be named in terms of European crisis of refugee politics, polity and policies, as I shall explain, led to unprecedented political polarization between the member states and to a deadlock in negotiations between the European institutions. Of course I'm talking mainly about the continent, as Ireland currently has no obligation to take in refugees as you negotiated an opt-in or opt-out clause in justice and immigration affairs for the Lisbon Treaty. On the level of politics or political disputes, disagreement about the competences of the EU and those of the member states, who should be responsible for the distribution of refugees for registration and return decisions for the external borders, the member states, the European Council, the Council of Ministers, or rather the EU's own agencies, Frontex, or IAZU, the European Asylum Support Office, who should decide upon about common standards, the Commission and the Parliament, or rather each member state on its own. With regard to policies, these disagreements became manifest above all in the form of disputes about the mandatory distribution of refugees among the member states. We all remember these disputes, I suppose, but underlying was a deep ideological disagreement about the question of EU competences in the area of refugee migration policy, all in all, and the direction of future policy. Ultimately, Europe was divided over ethical, legal, and political responsibility towards refugees and asylum seekers. On the level of polity, that is on the common norms and also common values, the current crisis in EU refugee policy is therefore also rightly seen as a crisis of solidarity and shared responsibility among the member states. Now what does a crisis imply? As a genuine crisis, it involves the risk of further division of interests, of re-nationalization and more and more decreasing solidarity regarding the issue of refugees in Europe. However, it also implies the opportunity to rethink and refocus on the basic principles of human rights and the values of the European Union, let down in the EU treaties, and of shared solidarity and responsibility. This is certainly one of them as are the principles of human rights and refugee rights. And this is why actually my key question in this lecture reads, how can human rights and refugee rights, how can more solidarity and shared responsibility be guaranteed in EU refugee policies even in a situation in which negotiations seem to have become so stuck? The content of EU refugee policy can be analyzed in terms of three concentric circles listed in order from the outside more towards the inside. The following areas can be distinguished. First, cooperation with refugees countries of origin and transit. Second, verifying and monitoring transit routes and external border controls. And lastly, within the inner circle, the European Union and its member states, all measures regarding registration, admission and distribution of refugees and all rights to which they are entitled once they reach the territory of a member state. The focus of this policy has increasingly moved from internal more towards the external issues. It originally focused on justice and home affairs. A policy that you look at very closely at this institute as I've learned before successively concentrating more on the external security and defence policy and also on developmental policy. The latest changes since 2015 have further intensified this change. This is important with regard to competences, of course. Since the European Parliament has hardly any co-decision rights and EU member states often lack a shared position and the ability to strengthen third countries in conflict resolution, promotion of democracy and development. With regard to policies, this touches the question of an eventual outsourcing of the European responsibility to provide protection. I now follow the three concentric circles beginning with the cooperation with countries of origin and transit. Consider a commitment is still required at a European and international level to plan a forward-looking refugee policy and to tackle the root causes of refugee migration by guaranteeing stability, the rule of laws, law and opportunities for participation in countries of origin. We need better data and predictions or scenario building like those made by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR, Frontex and the European Asylum Support Office, IASO. Predictions for further refugee movement, patterns and a quicker mechanism to effectively process any future inflows. It is also necessary to co-ordinate the efforts of the member states and maintain reserves for large flows of refugees that might still be coming. In any case, it is vital that the EU and its member states continue to push for global distribution of responsibility for the issue of refugees. Many observers were disappointed to see that the first high-level plenary session of the United Nations General Assembly on Refugees and Migration in September 2016 was not able to establish this principle in a binding way. Two global compacts are to be negotiated by 2018, the Global Compact for Refugees and the Global Compact for Safe, Regular and Orderly Migration, which should now place previous ad hoc reactions to large flows of refugees with regulated processes and prevent a disproportionately high load falling on individual host countries. At the global political level, at the same time, all eyes are focused on Europe and the way we cope with a so-called refugee crisis. It also has a bearing on Europe's credibility, I think, when it calls for refugee rights to be respected at the global level, the way it is treating the refugees. Faced with considerable secondary migration, the responsible decision makers in Brussels are increasingly aware of the paramount need to cooperate with countries of first arrival, which have admitted the greatest proportion of refugees over recent years. Ultimately, developing countries host 86% of refugees worldwide, although these refugees often do not have adequate access to international protection. Protracted stays in refugee camps lasting 18 years on average and the lack of resources among countries of first arrival are also push factors for onward migration, often in the direction of Europe. The EU has also identified partner countries of origin, transit and first arrival in Africa, with which it is keen to make migration compacts or migration partnerships. These compacts initially claim to focus on taking the reasons, calling people to seek asylum. However, the aim is also to stem the flow of irregular migration and to prevent people from smuggling and trafficking. In order to reduce the drivers for onward migration from countries of first arrival, the EU should above all increase the asylum standards along migration routes and countries of transit and first arrival for cooperation. It should not, however, rely on unsafe partner countries with dubious human rights records. It may be worth investing resources and also political capital in building up the border monitoring systems of third countries, but these policies must be accompanied by expanding protection and opportunities for refugees. The EU and its member states are bound to seriously apply these basic principles of human and refugee rights in negotiations with third countries. Cooperation with countries with questionable records on human rights and the rule of law is problematic in normative terms, but also on the grounds of diplomatic credibility. A single-minded focus on migration control in such partnerships, and we seriously see that migration control is one of the big issues in these partnerships, but a single-minded focus should give way to a broader humanitarian development-oriented and rights-based approach. A human rights mainstreaming approach should be developed for each of the stages of refuge and migration. A cornerstone of the new cooperation system with third countries is, of course, the EU-Turkey Statement. It has been criticized due to a lack of human and refugee rights guarantees in Turkey itself and also in Greece. Turkey proved itself to be entirely capable of limiting irregular migration on its coastlines. However, since the attempted coup in 2015, Turkey has come to be an increasingly unreliable partner, actually generating a large number of refugees itself, who are in great numbers coming to Germany. In fact, the agreement is being implemented at a time when Turkey is taking significant steps backwards in the area of the rule of law, human rights and protection for minorities, thus returning to authoritarianism. Despite this criticism of the EU-Turkey Statement and its implementation up to now, the EU aims to use it as a model for further similar agreements with countries in the Middle East and North Africa. This applies particularly in the event that migration movements return from the EG and the Balkan route to the central Mediterranean route, often involving transit through Sudan and Morocco and arriving in Italy. In terms of the conditions relating to human and refugee rights to be required by EU policy, the central question is under which conditions the European Union and third countries can enter into agreements like the so-called Turkey deal, and above all, which standards should be observed in collaboration with them? In view of the disastrous human rights records in the main North African transit countries, Libya and Egypt, it seems unlikely that they should be classified as safe third countries. Asylum applications from people coming from these countries can simply not be classified as manifestly unfounded. One cannot assume that European standards, of course, which even member states fail to implement, can be imposed immediately on third countries and completely. However, the European Union must be guided by the following principle. When it collaborates with third countries, it must encourage them to observe the highest possible standards for protection and processes, and it must continuously monitor these standards itself. At the same time, it is important to extend legal access routes, as developed to some extent in the EU Turkey deal with this kind of resettlement, and currently proposed in a resettlement framework from the European Commission. Proposals for refugee-oriented measures such as humanitarian admission programs, we have had two of them in Germany already, visas on humanitarian grounds and schemes for temporary protection have been on the table for years. These could be bolstered by regular mobility measures, such as extended family reunification, mobility for work and study, and medical evacuation measures. However, even those must be designed to ensure that smugglers and traffickers cannot explore the refugees, and they must offer guarantees against exploitation in host countries as well. In the medium and long term, creating legal access routes does not just relate to the migration of refugees, but also to legal and controlled path for labor migration at all its levels of education, even in the low wage sector. This is the refugee camp in Jordan, right at the Syrian border, which I visited two years ago, and from where many people made their way to Germany, actually as a sort of secondary migration. So now we are at the external border controls. The crisis in European refugee policy in 2015 and 2016, further shook confidence in the functioning of the Dublin system, which had been crumbling for some time already. The significant influx of migrants had been mainly a burden on countries with an external border, although not exclusively, of course, as the case of Germany shows. This led to an overloading of the asylum system in these places. The situation resulted in the construction of new borders. The reintroduction of temporary border controls at Schengen borders, also in my country, and partial closure of the Balkan routes. Rules that had been jointly agreed were broken. Asylum seekers were pushed back or waived through, or detained in violation of the Norwe-Fulmont principle. EU standards were not observed. There was few consultation on decision, and there were also human rights violation as a result of the enormous pressure on countries with external borders. There was, however, a quick consensus among member states that open internal borders should only be restored when external borders had been appropriately secured. However, this must not be at the cost of human and refugee rights requirements, and systematic sea rescue is required also with a consistent approach in order to end the death in the Mediterranean Sea. The European Commission has taken up the resolutions of the Foreign Affairs Council on Combating Smuggling, and the Council of the Foreign and Defence Ministers of the European Union, and this is moving further towards the outer concentric circles, and it agreed to launch a military operation in June 2015. Within the framework of the common security and defence policy, the EU with UNIFORMAD, or the operation SOFIA, is thus for the first time actively involved in a military operation to identify, apprehend and destroy the smugglers' ships carrying refugees and migrants in order to bust the business model of smugglers and traffickers, and at the same time to rescue people in the Mediterranean Sea. A three-stage plan was developed with the aim of disrupting the business model of human traffickers and smugglers. At the same time, we've got a hotspot solution on the Italian and Greek islands, and here, Ireland comes in again. This is where Ireland has opted in, voluntarily agreed to fully participate in the EU relocation scheme, by accepting up to 4,000 refugees, and it has established the Irish Refugee Protection Program. The hotspot solution on the Italian and Greek islands was one of the EU measures introduced during the crisis. However, the system only started up very gradually, to say the least. Not only did it lack an efficient way to assign stuff from other member states, it was also particularly lacking in human rights standards for admission, access to the asylum system, and questions relating to detention, identification and treatment, especially of vulnerable persons, and unaccompanied minors. Hotspots might remain on the external borders, if we look into the future, as hubs for registration, distribution and return. However, it would then be urgent to ensure that the agreed EU standards were observed, quick asylum systems and processes implemented, and adequate treatment and protection were granted. This also includes identifying the people that require special treatment during admission and processes. Vulnerable persons must be treated appropriately. Fingerprints must be taken without the use of force, and detention must only be used as a last resort. There is a need also for a strict monitoring system in the hotspots, I think, led by international organizations, NGOs and independent agents, such as an ombudsman, to check that the hotspots function in accordance with European standards. The link between the hotspots function and the poor functionings of the European Dublin system is, of course, clear. And there we have a new addition, second relaunch of the so-called Common European Asylum System, or CAS. The CAS first reformed in 2013, proved itself to be entirely insufficient under pressure of increased migration in 2015. Large divergences in admission, in the asylum procedure, and finally in the admission rates, continued or even increased, as the rising number of people arrived triggered a so-called race to the bottom. This resulted in lowering standards and stricter barriers to entry. The European Commission had just started 40 infringement procedures, I don't remember that, relating to transposition and implementation of the existing CAS system and directives, but these could hardly have any effect before the European Commission started the revision of the directives and regulations of the CAS. The aim of this new reform, once again, is to speed up the asylum system and to harmonize standards across the EU. As these comprehensive reforms are currently still at the negotiation phase, I can only include a brief overview and I will restrict to the Dublin system the most important element proposed so far in the upcoming third edition of the CAS. The European Commission suggested a new edition of the much criticized Dublin system right from the start. However, alternative proposals for a fair distribution of asylum seekers among member states appeared in an initial communication from the Commission, but it proved impossible to implement them. While the European Parliament recommended a thorough overhaul, the Wiesigrad Group categorically rejected it. The Commission finally opted for a less, much less ambitious version of a Dublin Plus system with the following key items. There are four of them, first transforming the temporary relocation system into a permanent corrective allocation mechanism, a distribution based on population size and the GDP, which would automatically come into force as soon as a member state had admitted 150% of the number of asylum seekers allotted to it. The figure of 150% was of course one of the most controversial proposals. As this threshold once more placed the asylum systems of countries of first arrival under excessive strain and cement the notion of an emergency mechanism rather than a proactive distribution system. Introduction is the second point. Introduction of a system for financial balancing or penalties, let's call them like that, a so-called financial solidarity mechanism in EU speech. If member states refused to admit asylum seekers, this system would force them to pay 250,000 euros for each asylum seeker that would otherwise have been allotted to this member state within 12 months. So a family with four members would mean one million euros. Third point, stricter requirements for the member states. Particularly a restriction of the member state sovereignty clause, which was the one Mrs. Merkel used in September 2015 in order to receive the refugees from Hungary and no shifting of responsibility in case of overrun of deadlines. And also last point, stricter requirements for the asylum seekers themselves. They would be obliged to apply for asylum in the country of first arrival of course, as they are now, but if they do not meet this obligation the responsible member state must assess their asylum application in an accelerated process. Asylum seekers should only receive benefits in kind, not money, in the member state responsible for their asylum process except for emergency medical treatment, and failure to carry out these duties would incur sanctions which remain in the hands of the member states. Despite all these proposals, the Dublin system essentially retains the principle that the countries of first arrival in the EU must still shoulder a particularly large burden, and are responsible for admitting asylum seekers and sending them for relocation or returning them to safe third countries. This means that Dublin 4 as it is called now is only a light alteration which remains in the previous logic rather than an initiative for necessary reform to achieve a more functional and efficient system. Until now, no consideration has been given to differentiated proposals for stronger involvement of asylum seekers themselves, such as free choice, which might be a bit naive, of course, or limited choice or the so-called Dublin miners. Repeated demands have been made to include family and social bonds, language skills, job matching, and other criteria for asylum seekers selection to provide positive incentives for asylum seekers to stay in the allocated country once they are in there and to open up the possibility of internal mobility within Europe through the mutual recognition of asylum processes. The proposal also significantly cuts the rights guaranteed in the now prevalent Dublin 3 regulation and includes new sanctions for irregular onward migration. Now, an important point is the asylum support office, which is in Malta, which will become a fully-fledged agency. And I suppose that the corresponding directive will be here before the summer break, I suppose, because this is a sort of, yeah, it is the Maltese presidency that wants to get it through and it's still the Maltese presidency until July. So it will become a fully-fledged agency. It can contribute to greater convergence between the member states and the future. The relationship between the agency and member states right now is to be changed. Exchange of information is to become obligatory in future rather than a form of voluntary cooperation as previously. In future, EASA should regularly check the member states list of, say, third countries of origin, pass on information about countries that a member state wants to add to a shared list and create guidelines on best practices for the implementation of the common European asylum system. EASA should also provide tailored support for individual member states. And the agency should also use its teams to carry out operative and technical tasks of the CAS implementation in the member states, particularly under a higher level of pressure from migration as Greece and Italy. EASA is therefore gradually expanding to become an asylum agency that could implement harmonized application of common rules in the member states, even if not requested to do so. And if a member state lacks the necessary ability or will, it could intervene independently. This development may offer an opening and even the European Commission sees it as an opportunity, even a long-term opportunity. The aim would then be to gradually eliminate the differences between the emission rates, which should not exist according to the specification of the CAS and thus end the asylum lottery that has been existing in Europe. However, until now, EASA still plays an important role but a support role for the national border for the asylum authorities. A real EU asylum agency or Euro BAMF, as we call it in Germany, is still not in view. There have also been fears with regard to the other directives and regulations that the current race to the bottom among the member states, which accelerated since 2015, could now even result in a reduction of human and refugee rights standards in the coming directives and regulations in the EU and despite some improvements which we are seeing now in the negotiations, particularly in the area of legal assistance and the rights of vulnerable persons and unaccompanied minors, these fears do not seem to be unfounded in light of the increased strictness of some member states. On the contrary, I think it is precisely now the right time for the EU to refocus on human rights as an ideological guiding force. Conclusions, the current situations of conflict and deadlock between member states and between states and the supranational bodies gives little grounds to hope for a refugee policy that is more proactive rather than reactive, more long-term rather than ad hoc and more consistent rather than fragmented. It may be possible, however, to resolve it through a two-speed or even multi-speed Europe with appropriate incentives for those countries that by and by participate in a distribution mechanism based on solidarity. Another option would be a division of tasks, so-called job sharing, where the countries are at the external borders permanently act as hubs for admitting, redirecting, while states in the center and the north work more with integration issues. In view of the upcoming elections still in Germany and possibly in Austria, a growing polarization of public opinion strongest supranational control of EU refugee and migration policy seems unlikely. Although recent individual policies given front-takes, they now called the European Coast and Border Guard, and the other more coordinated competences indicate a certain move in this direction towards a more supranational system. In a system with a more supranational approach in which the EU could overcome its fragmentation and control the movement of refugees effectively and in line with international law, EU policy could even help improve global protection of refugees. This requires to support countries of origin and transit, to create a European search and rescue agency, to provide legal access such as resettlement, extend resettlement but also other instruments, and as an overall frame to introduce a human rights and refugee rights mainstreaming strategy. The European Parliament still has an opportunity to raise the standards proposed in other regulations and directives and not simply defer changes to the ministers in the council. The results of the elections which are still pending, the responsibility to turn the crisis into an opportunity also to the voters. Thank you very much.