Abstract

The so-called contemporary refugee crisis can be defined as a European "right-toasylum crisis", a crisis of its fundamental principles, namely, the protection of asylum seekers' rights and the accompanying principle of non-refoulement. Here the modalities and trends shaping 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.