Guest Speaker: Dr Eiko Thielemann, The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

Abstract: EU level policy-making in the area of asylum and immigration policy has produced common legal standards that are often higher than those previously existing in many Member States.  Building on the insights of principal-agent models, non-majoritarian institutions like the European Commission and the European Court of Justice, which tend to be more isolated from the anti-immigrant sentiments held by significant parts of the electorate, have acted as important norm entrepreneurs and standard setters for migrant rights during recent refugee crises.  This lecture will seek to support this argument empirically through the comparative analysis of the EU asylum system and its evolution from the mid 1990s onwards.