Cities of refuge: local governments and the human rights of refugees in Europe

The refugee crisis poses a major challenge for Europe, in which local governments can play a key role. ‘Where states provide asylum, cities provide shelter’. Cities, however, show strikingly different responses, from emphasizing how #citieswelcomerefugees to overtly shunning them. This is why Cities of Refuge explores and explicates the relevance of international human rights, as law, praxis and discourse, to how local governments in Europe welcome and integrate refugees. This is urgent, as human rights can theoretically provide legal clarity on local government responsibilities, practical standards and a discursive frame for refugee welcome and integration. The innovation here is twofold. It first concerns explicit recognition of local governments as human rights actors in a multi-level context. Next, Cities of Refuge combines law, sociology and anthropology to develop a novel localized understanding of human rights. This will: 1) Contribute to a sustainable long-term, localized solution of the refugee crisis 2) Strengthen human rights law with new, empirically grounded, insights The legal analysis will yield much-needed clarity on local governments as human rights duty bearers. It forms the basis for the assessment of local praxis via specific human rights indicators. The empirical analysis will subsequently employ a multilevel sampling design of 6 countries and 4 cities that are either overtly welcoming or hostile. This design enables assessment of the impact of structural factors, like EU membership, local autonomy, border status and city size next to exploration of discourse. Stakeholders are involved throughout the research, amongst others via an interactive map that enables crowd research. In all, Cities of Refuge will explicate legal obligations and explore local practices. What is to be gained, in the end, is insight into the potential role of human rights in addressing one of the largest challenges of our times.