Beyond Resettlement: Complementary Pathways to Protection in the EU

The amount of displaced people is constantly growing in the world and solutions additional to resettlement are necessary to ensure adequate protection. Complementary pathways to protection, articulated in the Global Compact on Refugees in 2018, represent such solutions. The European Union commited to these humanitarian efforts to develop and expand complementary pathways, incorporating them into the New Pact for Migraiton and Asylum in the form of the recommendations policy document. This research looks into how complementary pathways (CPs) have been developing and expanding in the EU, and what role do the existing and proposed migration policies under the New Pact play in this regard. The recommendations were supported by the Asylum Migration and Integration Fund in 2020, where selected projects plan to improve, expand and make CPs mechanisms a sustainable practice for admitting people in need of protection. Analysis of the existing and newly proposed CPs showed that non-legislative EU policies under the New Pact had positive results on expansion of programmes, improving existing initiatives, setting up new projects, all while creating the foundation for multistakeholder cooperation and policy dialogue on both the national and EU levels. However, policies guiding admission of third country nationals to the EU continue to pose legal and administrative barriers, hindering access to complementary pathways for people in need of protection