Chapter 4 explores how appellate authorities in the EU understand and approach situations of armed conflict. This chapter claims that appellate authorities approach situations of armed conflict predominantly through the perspective of conventional warfare and a notion of territoriality. Such a perspective fails to acknowledge that one of the main strategies of fighting parties is to exercise political control over territory by forcibly displacing and terrorising populations through highly visible forms of human rights violations. The findings bring to the fore the misconceptions regarding the application of the Refugee Convention to persons fleeing armed conflicts, namely a perceived dichotomy between a risk of individual persecution and a risk arising from widespread violence. The research challenges appellate authorities’ conflation of asymmetrical warfare with lower levels of violence and less serious forms of violence contrary to knowledge in the field of feminist and security studies indicating that non-conventional armed conflicts are in fact characterised by armed groups’ relative control over the exercise of strategic, and thus political, violence. The chapter concludes that the existence of two distinct legal statuses in the EU based on reasons for flight operates as an obstacle to the development of international refugee law.

This chapter foregrounds the subjective experience of asylum seekers like Hassan Ali Djan, who arrived in Munich from Afghanistan via Iran, Turkey, and Greece in 2005. It also presents accessibly the complex history of asylum legislation and practice across time. It points out the continuities amidst the changes: the number of refugees varies, the major countries of origin vary (at one point Bosnia, at another Syria), the escape routes vary (at one point the eastern, at another the middle Mediterranean route), the popularity of destinations changes (at one point Britain, at another Germany). What remains the same is that the causes that rarely allow for a neat separation of “political persecution” from economic, religious, ethnic, and other factors; refugees, who are rarely the oldest, the weakest, and the sick, but rather are young and dynamic; the reliance of refugees on word of mouth and local networks; the role of the traffickers and others who are inextricably part of the economy of refugee migration logistics; rescue, relief, gratitude; and countless traumas and tragedies.

This chapter explores how humanitarian values influenced the broadening of the personal scope of asylum and compassionate grounds relate to protection grounds, such as refugee status and subsidiary protection. In the last couple of decades, a number of states have introduced the possibility of granting residence permits to non-nationals with a reference to humanitarian or compassionate reasons. These categories are generally not considered to have received ‘asylum’, but receive leave to remain or temporary residence permits. It is frequently claimed that humanitarian status is significantly different than refugee status and even so-called subsidiary protection and that its legal and conceptual basis is different. The phenomenon of admitting, or refraining from returning, persons crossing an international border because it would be contrary to humanitarian values is, however, not new and what are currently considered as compassionate, or humanitarian, grounds for admission or non-expulsion have throughout times been considered grounds for asylum or protection.