Misrecognizing Asylum. Causes, modalities and consequences of the crisis of a fundamental human right

The so-called contemporary refugee crisis can be defined as a European “right to asylum crisis”, a crisis of its fundamental principles: the protection of asylum seekers’ rights and the related principle of non-refoulement. Modalities and trends marking the recognition of asylum applicants as refugees, and of migrants as asylum seekers, will be considered along with the current implementation of the notion of a “safe country” within the context of EU texts on migration developed since 2015. This “right to asylum crisis” is then briefly analyzed as both a symptom and a cause of the European Union project’s wider political and cultural crisis.