1 Introduction
Following almost forty years of operating essentially in isolation in Canada, community sponsorship has gathered recent international momentum, with fourteen countries piloting or establishing community sponsorship schemes since 2015 alone. In the EU, the fallout of the 2015 migrant and refugee crisis has driven a search for innovative approaches to protection, including the development of community sponsorship schemes in Germany, Ireland, Italy and Spain, as well as the United Kingdom. In the recent New Pact on Migration and Asylum, the European Commission calls for the development of a ‘European model’ of community sponsorship, though the key features of such an approach remain unexplained.Footnote 1 Outside Europe, both Australia and New Zealand have piloted community-based models.Footnote 2 Most recently, the United States has launched a community sponsorship programme to support evacuated Afghans.Footnote 3 Beyond traditional resettlement states in the Global North, Argentina has implemented a community sponsorship model supporting the integration of Syrian refugees.
Community sponsorship has no settled definition, but inherent to the model is shared responsibility between civil society and the state for the admission and/or integration of refugees.Footnote 4 Community sponsorship has been described by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as ‘programmes where individuals or groups of individuals come together to provide financial, emotional and practical support toward reception and integration’ of refugees.Footnote 5
The rise of community sponsorship has tracked the development and implementation of the Global Compact on Refugees (‘the Compact’), a non-binding international agreement for ‘predictable and equitable responsibility-sharing’ passed by the UN General Assembly in December 2018.Footnote 6 In particular, community sponsorship is closely linked to one of the four Compact objectives focused on the expansion of ‘third country solutions’ through resettlement and complementary pathways.Footnote 7 UNHCR defines complementary pathways as ‘safe and regulated avenues for refugees that complement resettlement by providing lawful stay in a third country where their international protection needs are met’.Footnote 8 Complementary pathways identified in the Compact are family reunification, private refugee sponsorship, humanitarian visas and labour and educational opportunities for refugees.
The global push to expand community sponsorship may be traced to the 2016 New York Declaration, which calls for the expansion of resettlement and other alternative avenues to asylum for refugees. The Global Refugee Sponsorship Initiative was launched in the margins of the New York Declaration, with a mandate to ‘encourage and support the adoption and expansion of refugee sponsorship programs around the world’.Footnote 9 More broadly, community sponsorship is aligned to the Compact as an example of a whole-of-society approach to refugee protection, which includes local authorities.Footnote 10 At the first Global Refugee Forum held in December 2019, Brazil, Belgium, Malta and Portugal pledged to explore pilot community sponsorship models, while Finland has recently completed a feasibility study for a pilot scheme.Footnote 11
Against the backdrop of this rapid uptake of community sponsorship models, this chapter seeks to set out key protective principles drawn from international human rights and refugee law. At this early stage of the development of community sponsorship beyond Canada, the purpose of these principles is to guide the implementation of community sponsorship and inform policymakers and advocates seeking to implement new or adjust existing programmes. In keeping with this volume’s focus on the ‘local turn’ in migration governance, the chapter further addresses the current and potential roles of local authorities in community sponsorship schemes.Footnote 12 The chapter concludes that while national governments remain the ‘ultimate gatekeepers’ in terms of the creation and scale of community sponsorship models, globally engaged local authorities have the potential to ensure a principled approach to community sponsorship as a means to increase protection space.
This contribution proceeds in five sections. First, the role of resettlement and complementary pathways in the Compact is discussed, as a counterpoint to the lack of access to asylum in destination states in the Global North. Second, the chapter frames community sponsorship as a flexible concept that may take the form of resettlement or standalone a complementary pathway to protection. Third, the chapter uses the recent proliferation of community sponsorship models to draw out both promising and problematic practices in terms of refugee protection. Fourth, the role of local authorities in the various community sponsorship models is explored. Finally, the chapter puts forward a number of protection principles to inform new and existing community sponsorship models, before providing some concluding reflections on the place of community sponsorship in the international refugee regime and the role of local authorities in developing this form of refugee protection.
2 Resettlement and Complementary Pathways in the Global Compact on Refugees
The adoption of the Compact as a global responsibility sharing instrument comes against a backdrop of the ‘deterrence paradigm’Footnote 13 in traditional asylum countries, in which a broad array of ‘non-entrée’ measures prevent asylum seekers accessing the territory or asylum procedures of destination states.Footnote 14 As a result, lack of legal access to asylum for refugees has emerged as a key gap in the international refugee regime in the past thirty years, with some authors predicting the end of the right to seek asylum in the Global North.Footnote 15
The Compact does not directly address challenges of access to asylum, instead placing the expansion of resettlement and complementary pathways as one of its four objectives.Footnote 16 Paragraphs 94–96 provide that such pathways should act as a ‘complement to resettlement’, and the Compact aims to significantly increase their availability and predictability. The Compact further provides that complementary pathways ‘contain appropriate protection safeguards’, though it does not elaborate on what standards these contain.Footnote 17 Following the adoption of the Compact, UNHCR set out highly ambitious targets for increased resettlement and complementary pathways in the decade ahead.Footnote 18
Such controlled pathways are often the preferred modes of protection in destination countries, rather than spontaneous asylum.Footnote 19 Resettlement is not an international legal obligation but rather a discretionary policy choice.Footnote 20 As Hashimoto points out, ‘no state has a legal obligation proactively to admit refugees via resettlement who are still outside their jurisdiction; nor can a refugee claim a “right” to be resettled’.Footnote 21
Resettlement is palatable to destination states as it is a means of providing asylum that meets their control interests in a number of respects. First, resettlement involves the orderly movement of recognised refugees across international borders, in some contrast to the spontaneous arrival of asylum seekers.Footnote 22 Second, resettlement involves the predictable allocation of annual quotas, allowing the destination state to predetermine how many refugees receive protection in a given year. Furthermore, resettlement allows destination states to allow access to recognised refugees only, thereby avoiding the entry of migrants not requiring international protection. This is particularly pertinent in the EU, where implemented return rates hover around 40 per cent.Footnote 23 In a number of destination states, admission of refugees under an organised resettlement program tends to be more politically popular than the admission of asylum seekers.Footnote 24
Resettlement and complementary pathways allow destination states to maintain a commitment to the international refugee regime, holding out a form of responsibility sharing to ‘trade-off’ deterrence efforts.Footnote 25 This tendency is evident in the linking of the two approaches. The EU–Turkey Statement, for example, includes a built-in resettlement element, with one Syrian refugee resettled for every one returned. Australia’s deterrence efforts are often justified in terms of a relatively generous resettlement program.Footnote 26 This relationship between deterrence, on the one hand, and controlled pathways via third-country solutions, on the other, runs as a red thread through the implementation of the Compact.Footnote 27
3 Conceptualising Community Sponsorship
Community sponsorship may be either a form of resettlement or a complementary pathway.Footnote 28 A 2018 study undertaken by the European Commission, as well as a number of individual country feasibility studies, demonstrate the wide range of approaches to community sponsorship, straddling more established forms of resettlement and standalone complementary pathways.Footnote 29 The following explains how the concept is best understood as an ‘umbrella’ term encompassing several different modalities.Footnote 30
Community sponsorship as a tool for resettlement focuses solely on integration support for resettled refugees matched with civil society sponsors. Rather than creating a pathway to admission, community sponsorship involves integration assistance for resettled refugees. This model of community sponsorship uses existing UNHCR and state resettlement channels (including selection, referral, health checks etc.) to admit refugees. Civil society involvement is generally limited to the provision of support after arrival and focused on the successful integration of refugees. Moreover, community sponsorship as resettlement usually benefits UNHCR-referred refugees, rather than ‘named’ individuals, although practice varies between jurisdictions.Footnote 31
Existing community sponsorship schemes in Ireland and the United Kingdom are squarely focused on the support of resettled refugees, initiated within the state resettlement quota with the intention of becoming additional over time.Footnote 32 Similarly, the German Neustart im Team (NesT) programme is a clear example of community sponsorship as a resettlement tool.
Community sponsorship models that involve privately led admission and integration of asylum seekers and refugees create a standalone complementary pathway. Such programmes are firmly separated from state-run resettlement as an ‘initiative by private associations with recognized expertise in the field to provide for an alternative, legal, and safe pathway’.Footnote 33 In its original form in Canada, community sponsorship involved the ‘naming’ of individual refugees by sponsors and the creation of a pathway independent of other channels to admission.Footnote 34 More recently, the Humanitarian Corridors model pioneered in Italy is a good example of community sponsorship as a complementary pathway.Footnote 35 Community sponsorship may also form a complementary pathway for the purpose of family reunification, such as the German Federal Länder Sponsorship Scheme, in place between 2013 and 2018.Footnote 36
Community sponsorship as a complementary pathway raises questions of the extent to which the model provides protection to refugees, rather than other migrants. Hashimoto has recently critiqued the role of complementary pathways as risking the transformation of the institution of asylum into ‘a neoliberal, privatised immigration enterprise reserved only for highly skilled and educated migrants or for certain ethnic or religious groups’.Footnote 37 By contrast, Van Selm highlights their potential as ‘ways out of the asylum and refugee policy debate and deterrence in Europe’.Footnote 38
Finally, the long-standing question of additionality is a constant tension between an approach that is complementary to existing resettlement, thus expanding protection, and a model that replaces state resettlement, leading to concerns of outsourcing or privatisation of refugee protection.Footnote 39 In essence, additionality in community sponsorship expands refugee protection, while community sponsorship that replaces resettlement allows the state to outsource its responsibility.Footnote 40 To meet the principles outlined in this contribution, community sponsorship models should expand refugee protection, not merely shift responsibility from government to civil society or private actors.
Nevertheless, additionality is not a straightforward concept, and pragmatic considerations may require that initial community sponsorship models take place within existing resettlement quotas.Footnote 41 In such cases, a shift to additionality in the short to medium-term should remain a focus, with the realistic understanding that some national governments may seek to dilute or reverse-engineer additionality.Footnote 42 As discussed later, local authorities have a key role to play in holding national governments to account in this respect, to ensure that community sponsorship models expand rather than outsource refugee protection.
Relatedly, the establishment of community sponsorship schemes in states with no existing resettlement programme raises complex questions of pragmatic or realistic approaches. On the one hand, community sponsorship has the potential to kick start resettlement by mobilising local authorities, civil society and private funding where national governments have historically proven unwilling. Some authors have recently pointed out that the introduction of complementary pathways, including community sponsorship, may lead to the ‘development of fully-fledged and regular resettlement programmes’.Footnote 43 On the other hand, the establishment of privately led resettlement may disincentivise governments from assuming their traditional responsibilities for such programmes whatsoever.
4 Promising and Problematic Practices
The primary objective of community sponsorship models should be the protection of refugees. The proliferation of new and varied community sponsorship models offers some recent but rich examples of practices to be emulated and avoided. The following makes some reflections on promising and problematic practices in the development of community sponsorship since 2015.
A number of community sponsorship models have successfully expanded protection for refugees, by remaining or emerging as additional to state resettlement. Canadian sponsors supported 62,000 Syrian refugees between 2015 and 2020 alone, over and above the Canadian government’s resettlement scheme.Footnote 44 Humanitarian Corridors Italy has provided a safe and legal pathway to protection for 3,632 refugees since 2016, in addition to the country’s annual resettlement programme of 1,000 places.Footnote 45 On a smaller scale, Germany’s NeST model is additional to the national resettlement program, with 400 sponsored refugees admitted from Germany’s overall resettlement quota of 5,500.Footnote 46 The United Kingdom Community Sponsorship Scheme started out within the state’s resettlement quota, with the government pledging additionality at the Global Refugee Forum.Footnote 47
A further promising practice is the provision of permanent protection to refugees under a number of community sponsorship models. In this respect, the close links between community sponsorship and resettlement have proven useful. While complementary pathways generally provide refugees with ‘lawful stay in a third country where their international protection needs are met’,Footnote 48 most community sponsorship schemes currently provide permanent protection to refugees, or at least temporary visas with the expectation of subsequent permanent residence.Footnote 49 There are at least two possible reasons for this relatively generous level of protection. First, the use of resettlement channels for sponsored refugees introduces a presumption of permanent protection, as resettlement by definition involves the ‘transfer of refugees from one State in which they have sought protection to a third State which has agreed to admit them – as refugees – with permanent residence status’.Footnote 50 Second, the integration-focused role of sponsors tends towards permanent rather than temporary protection. In Denmark, for example, the feasibility of community sponsorship is significantly hampered by a recent policy shift to temporary protection of refugees.Footnote 51
Finally, some recent community sponsorship programs have placed significant focus on practical safeguards for sponsored refugees. In particular, the creation of civil society focal points with expertise in refugee support to screen, select and train sponsors is good practice to ensure refugees benefit from sponsors. Such a body is vital to act as liaison between sponsors and government, as well as to step in in the case of sponsorship breakdown.Footnote 52 Building on Canada’s Sponsorship Agreement Holders model, Ireland, Germany and the United Kingdom have all established such civil society focal points. Relatedly, recent practice has prioritised monitoring and evaluation of community sponsorship schemes, in part to ensure refugees are adequately supported during sponsorship.Footnote 53 Systematic evaluations have been undertaken soon after implementation in, for example, the Basque region,Footnote 54 New ZealandFootnote 55 and the United Kingdom.Footnote 56
A number of more problematic practices may also be observed. Some community sponsorship models have featured discrimination between refugees on the basis of religion. For example, ad hoc community sponsorship models in the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia provided admission only to Christians, with no consideration of international protection needs.Footnote 57 Refugees admitted under these schemes either moved on to another EU member state or returned to their country of origin.Footnote 58 By contrast, community sponsorship schemes in Germany (NesT), New Zealand and the United Kingdom draw beneficiaries from UNHCR’s resettlement submission categories, which focus referrals on seven objective criteria in line with the humanitarian basis of resettlement.Footnote 59
Still, other community sponsorship models have shifted the focus of community sponsorship away from protection to particular migration streams, such as labour migration or family reunion. Australia’s Community Support Program, notably, provides for 1,000 sponsored refugees per year within Australia’s resettlement scheme. However, the scheme only supports refugees who are ‘job-ready’ with ‘functional English’ and sponsors pay significant costs related to visas, administration and integration.Footnote 60 As a result, the Community Support Program has been criticised as ‘an exercise in the privatization of resettlement responsibilities and costs’ more akin to a labour migration or family reunification scheme than a humanitarian mechanism.Footnote 61 Similarly, New Zealand’s pilot included job-focused eligibility criteria.Footnote 62 Previous practice has also placed onerous requirements on sponsors, causing stress for both sponsors and refugees. Germany’s Federal Länder Sponsorship Scheme, a family reunification model in place between 2013 and 2018, was criticised for requiring individuals to commit to five years of sponsorship.Footnote 63
Finally, inadequate policy frameworks have revealed corruption in community sponsorship in at least one case. In Belgium, a city counsellor has been arrested on suspicion of selling humanitarian visas to refugees for €20,000 under a humanitarian corridors pilot.Footnote 64 Notwithstanding its undoubted successes, the Humanitarian Corridors model places significant responsibility for selection of refugees on faith-based actors. A robust policy framework at both national and local levels is necessary to avoid such governance problems, especially where pilot programs are used to test the possibility of a permanent community sponsorship model.Footnote 65
5 The Role of Local Authorities in Community Sponsorship
The role of local authorities in community sponsorship models requires further research. In Canada, the question is less relevant as the federal government is responsible for the country’s community sponsorship streams, with the exception of the provincial government of Quebec. Hitherto, in those jurisdictions where community sponsorship is in a pilot or relatively recent phase, focus has tended to remain on the role of national authorities and civil society.Footnote 66 Nevertheless, the legal, policy and operational roles of local authorities are often essential to the inception and implementation of community sponsorship models.
The role of local authorities in refugee governance more broadly is addressed in the Compact as ‘among the actors that experience the most significant impact over the medium term’.Footnote 67 However, while the Global Compact on Refugees goes on to call on cities and municipalities to share their good practices and innovative approaches in supporting refugees, it falls short of outlining the role of local governance actors in resettlement and complementary pathway arrangements, including community sponsorship. Sabchev and Baumgärtel have sought to bridge this gap, calling for the upscaling of ‘locally organised, city-led routes’ to protection for refugees in the EU, given the capacity of municipal and regional authorities to assess local capacity to host and integrate refugees, manage refugee reception and integration and a recent tendency of local governments to cooperate directly with key international organisations, notably UNHCR and International Organization for Migration.Footnote 68
Three overlapping tendencies in the roles of local authorities are observed here, telegraphing the increasingly important role of local authorities in both the uptake and implementation of community sponsorship schemes. First, local authorities champion locally driven community sponsorship, often as a counterpoint to the restrictive policies of national governments. Since 2015, for example, Barcelona, Vienna and Hamburg have repeatedly expressed their willingness to host and support refugees, often in direct opposition to their national counterparts.Footnote 69 Similarly, Barcelona and Athens agreed in 2016 to cooperate on a pilot project to relocate 100 refugees living in camps in the Greek capital to Barcelona, which was ultimately rejected by the national Spanish government.Footnote 70 With respect to complementary pathways more broadly, German self-declared ‘Safe Ports’ municipalities have lobbied their states to develop humanitarian admission programmes. Most recently, a Thuringia state proposal for a humanitarian admission programme aimed at Afghans was blocked by the German federal interior ministry.Footnote 71
Such city-led advocacy with respect to community sponsorship in some ways reflects the broader sanctuary cities movement from the United States dating back to the 1980s,Footnote 72 as well as the emergence of the Solidarity Cities project in Europe since 2016.Footnote 73 However, the advocacy of local authorities with respect to community sponsorship is distinct from the sanctuary city concept in important respects. Perhaps most notably, cities calling for the introduction of community sponsorship are actively seeking to provide an avenue to protection for refugees, rather than supporting the enduring residence of those already present. Moreover, cities calling for community sponsorship models generally propose protection for a relatively small group of refugees, rather than large groups of existing migrant or refugee populations.
Second, and related, subnational authorities have played a catalytic role in certain settings. The Basque regional government in Spain led the country’s community sponsorship pilot, advocating for the scheme through negotiations with national authorities in Madrid.Footnote 74 The pilot supporting five Syrian families took place within Spain’s National Resettlement Program,Footnote 75 with a 2019 agreement between the Ministry of Labour, Migration and Social Security, the Basque regional government, UNHCR Spain, Caritas Euskadi and Ellacuría Foundation placing responsibility for the reception of sponsored refugees with the Basque regional government.Footnote 76 The Spanish pilot is further an example of cooperation between regional and municipal authorities, as the Basque regional government distributed beneficiaries among the three major Basque cities of Bilbao, Donostia and Vitoria.Footnote 77 Local authorities in other EU states have expressed interest in piloting local or regional models, with a number of Swedish municipalities currently considering a pilot.Footnote 78
Finally, local authorities clearly often play an important operational role in implementing a community sponsorship scheme. In many European states, municipal authorities are responsible for delivering the entirety or majority of refugees’ integration programmes, ranging from housing assistance, language classes, cultural orientation and employment support.Footnote 79 In the United Kingdom, for example, the cities of Bristol and Birmingham support local community sponsorship by raising awareness among volunteer organisations and training and coordinating and monitoring sponsorship groups.Footnote 80
However, the inclusion of civil society in integration systems run by local authorities that community sponsorship entails gives rise to questions of complexity. In a recent UNHCR scoping report on the feasibility of community sponsorship in Sweden, existing coordination between multiple national agencies and municipalities was identified as a challenge to the devolution of certain responsibilities to a civil society actor.Footnote 81 In contrast, a recent Finnish study on the potential for introducing community sponsorship found extensive cooperation between municipalities and civil society, concluding that existing cooperation provides ‘a functional foundation for a community sponsorship programme’.Footnote 82
6 Towards Protection Principles
The proliferation of new community sponsorship models since 2015 bring both risks and opportunities for refugee protection. On the one hand, the rapid growth of community sponsorship means national and local policymakers may quickly be informed of the various models implemented in multiple jurisdictions. On the other hand, the inherent flexibility of the concept may leave it open to co-option where, for example, governments use community sponsorship to replace resettlement, or discriminate by protecting only particular groups. To mitigate these risks, the following section suggests six protective standards drawn from international human rights and refugee law and lessons from recent practice.Footnote 83
6.1 Additionality
Additionality should remain at the forefront of discussions on community sponsorship, to avoid the effective outsourcing of government responsibilities. Community sponsorship should not replace resettlement.Footnote 84 However, the question of additionality is becoming increasingly complex. It is notable, for example, that the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum does not stress additionality in proposing the development of an ‘European model’ of community sponsorship.Footnote 85 While ideally community sponsorship schemes should be additional to existing resettlement programmes from the outset, pragmatic considerations may require that community sponsorship models initially take place within existing resettlement quotas. This is because national governments are, in general, reluctant to increase annual resettlement quotas. In such cases, a shift to additionality in the short to medium-term must remain a priority – an approach that may be termed ‘additionality in principle’. Moreover, some national governments may seek to ‘reverse engineer’ additionality when negotiating the state quota in relation to community sponsorship.
The result of increased involvement of local governments with respect to additionality may be somewhat mixed. On the one hand, local governments focused on integration outcomes may not support additional community sponsorship quotas, as their primary interest lies in improved integration of refugees under existing resettlement quotas. On the other hand, other local governments can play a crucial role in insisting upon additionality by joining forces with local and transnational sponsorship actors, especially given municipalities’ key operational role in European countries. To uphold this principle, local authorities involved in community sponsorship programmes need an eye not only to integration outcomes but also the overall purpose of community sponsorship as a means to increase protection space.
6.2 Respecting the Right to Seek Asylum
The introduction and expansion of community sponsorship models should not be used by national governments to justify restrictions on access to spontaneous asylum.Footnote 86 In other words, community sponsorship should not be instrumentalised to distract from deterrence policies. While state resettlement has long been used strategically in this way,Footnote 87 there is little evidence that the strategic use of resettlement has actually driven down spontaneous asylum.Footnote 88 Given its locally driven nature, community sponsorship should be at least somewhat insulated from national government interests in this regard.
Increased involvement of local authorities in community sponsorship schemes are likely to support this principle. Municipalities and regional governments playing a key role in driving community sponsorship models often serve as a counterweight to the restrictive agendas of national governments. While national governments retain sovereign power in terms of admission to the state and the creation of new community sponsorship models, the combined advocacy role of international actors ‘from above’, such as UNHCR and the Global Refugee Sponsorship Initiative, and subnational authorities ‘from below’, such as regional and municipal authorities, have the potential to shore up the right to seek asylum through pressure on national governments.Footnote 89
6.3 Non-Discrimination and Equal Treatment
The principle of non-discrimination flowing from international human rights and refugee law must inform state practice on community sponsorship.Footnote 90 As UNHCR notes, community sponsorship should be ‘non-discriminatory and not distinguish on the basis of nationality, race, gender, religious belief, class or political opinion’.Footnote 91 Learning from previous practice in Eastern Europe, future community sponsorship models should avoid discrimination in the selection of refugees for sponsorship. Moreover, principles of equal treatment require that sponsored refugees not be treated differentially from government-resettled refugees during integration, and vice versa. In particular, in the case of relationship breakdown, the principle of non-discrimination requires that the government (be it municipal, regional or national, depending on modalities) step in to protect the rights of a sponsored refugee and ensure equal treatment between sponsored and traditionally resettled refugees.
While non-discrimination should be a key principle across local and national governments, the involvement of multiple subnational authorities in a community sponsorship scheme can provide flexibility in accommodating particular demographic preferences. Provided the principle of non-discrimination informs the selection and admission of sponsored refugees, it is appropriate for local authorities to be ‘matched’ with beneficiaries on the basis of relevant demographics or background.
6.4 Protection-Focused
Community sponsorship should remain firmly focused on refugee protection. At a minimum, beneficiaries must meet the definition of refugeehood set out in Article 1A(2) of the 1951 Refugee Convention, or a regional variation thereof, to be eligible for a community sponsorship scheme. This means, for example, learning the lessons from Australia’s Community Support Program, which is as much centred around labour market integration as refugee protection. Equally, the use of community sponsorship to facilitate family reunification should neither replace the state’s family reunification obligationsFootnote 92 nor place unreasonable burdens on sponsors.Footnote 93
The initiative of some local authorities in proposing, realising and operating community sponsorship schemes with the explicit aim of refugee protection suggests that increased involvement of local authorities support this principle. For example, the Basque pilot in Spain was undertaken in alignment with the regional government’s ‘commitment to solidarity, human rights and peace’.Footnote 94 Equally, the repeated calls from German Länder and municipalities to establish humanitarian admission programmes for Afghan refugees points to the more principled approach of some local authorities over national governments.
6.5 Clarity of Legal Status
Community sponsorship approaches should provide a clear legal status to sponsored refugees. In general, refugees admitted under a community sponsorship scheme should be entitled to the full set of rights afforded other refugees in the country, in line with the principle of non-discrimination and socio-economic rights set out in the 1951 Convention.Footnote 95 As a matter of international law, responsibility for the provision of these rights rests with the national government, though as a matter of practice – particularly in the EU – municipalities are responsible for securing the integrative rights of refugees through, for example, education and employment training.
Community sponsorship as resettlement carries the additional status of providing a durable solution, thus often amounting to permanent residence more rapidly than community sponsorship as complementary pathway. Once again, the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum does not address legal status in its initial proposal for a ‘European model’ of community sponsorship.Footnote 96
6.6 Robust Policy Framework
Finally, community sponsorship approaches should be supported by a robust policy framework at both national and local levels. In particular, any model involving a ‘naming’ element should include safeguards to ensure the integrity of the selection process and, at a minimum, a requirement that the named individual meet the definition of refugee contained in Article 1A(2) of the 1951 Refugee Convention, or a regional variation thereof.Footnote 97 Ultimate responsibility for refugees must clearly remain with state authorities, not private actors.
With respect to local governance, a clear, workable division of labour between national, regional and local authorities is crucial, particularly in countries where municipalities are central to the integration of refugees. In her work on resettlement, for example, Stürner has called for increased ‘local ownership’ and even the creation of a Municipal Resettlement Programme within the EU.Footnote 98 A recent evaluation of the Basque pilot, called noted that ‘local administrations can enrich community sponsorship and should be involved from the outset’.Footnote 99
7 Conclusions: Community Sponsorship, Local Governance and the International Refugee Regime
The scale, additionality and protection-focus of community sponsorship will define its success in meaningfully contributing to the international protection of refugees. With low resettlement numbers since the COVID-19 pandemic and pressure on the Compact to deliver, the push to expand community sponsorship is already being felt.Footnote 100 In the coming years, we are likely to see the emergence of new community sponsorship models that challenge the protective core of the concept. Three critical reflections are provided here: the role of community sponsorship with respect to the Global Compact on Refugees; the relationship between local authorities and international actors in community sponsorship; and the current and potential future role of local authorities in this area.
First, community sponsorship is emerging as a key pillar of the Global Compact on Refugees, both as a tool for resettlement and a standalone complementary pathway.Footnote 101 Community sponsorship is part of a suite of ‘controlled’ avenues to protection with the potential to meet the Compact objective of expanding access to third-country solutions. However, against a backdrop of restrictions on territorial asylum exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic,Footnote 102 it remains highly unlikely that community sponsorship and other third-country solutions can be scaled up to fill the substantial protection gaps extant in the international refugee regime.
Moreover, there is a risk that community sponsorship may be employed as a ‘fig leaf’ to divert from restrictions on access to asylum. For example, the introduction of a small-scale community sponsorship pilot by a particular state cannot meaningfully contribute to solutions for refugees when the national government is simultaneously preventing access to territory and/or national asylum procedures for spontaneous arrivals.
Second, and related, locally led efforts towards community sponsorship under the auspices of instruments like the Compact can lead to the ‘decoupling’ of local policies from national approaches in the field of migration governance.Footnote 103 The engagement of cities, municipalities and regional governments with the Compact establishes transnational feedback loops between local authorities and UN processes and entities. Indeed, such transnational networks are already emerging, through UNHCR’s granting of the regional Nansen award to the Humanitarian Corridors initiative and the use of the Compacts’ ‘good practices’ portal by local authorities.Footnote 104 While I am not confident we will see what Sabchev and Baumgärtel label a ‘paradigm shift in migration governance’ through locally led community sponsorship,Footnote 105 the connecting of local governments with transnational and international actors, such as the Global Refugee Sponsorship Initiative and UNHCR, increases the prospects of the emergence of a principled approach to the community sponsorship of refugees.
Third, the role of local authorities in driving the principled development of community sponsorship is not straightforward. On the one hand, as a locally driven initiative community sponsorship is particularly well suited to leadership from subnational authorities. The track record of some local authorities in proposing, advocating for and implementing community sponsorship schemes indicates the enormous potential for local ownership of this new mode of welcoming refugees. On the other hand, as community sponsorship is inherently concerned with the admission of refugees (either through traditional resettlement pathways or as a standalone complementary pathway), local authorities equally face the reality that national authorities remain the ultimate ‘gatekeeper’ in terms of uptake, durability and scale of community sponsorship schemes.
There may be no elegant solution to this tension in the role of local governments in community sponsorship models. A key factor here is the need for local authorities to be globally engaged, with an eye not only to immediate local outcomes but also the sustainability of community sponsorship as a means to increase refugee protection locally, nationally and internationally.
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