Should refugees in the European Union have voting rights?

ABSTRACT

Most refugees residing in the European Union (EU) do not retain their voting rights in states of origin or lack the means to exercise them effectively. Most member states of the EU do not extend voting rights to refugees. This leaves a large population of refugees residing within the borders of the EU in a unique state of disenfranchisement. In this article, I consider this problem from a democratic perspective. Should refugees in the EU have voting rights? My answer turns on three aspects characterizing the circumstances of refugees: First, refugees reside in member states for an indeterminate, and typically protracted, amount of time without any exit options. Second, the political governance of the EU and its member states significantly shapes the lives of refugees. And third, refugees lack effective voting rights, and consequently, a meaningful political membership, in any political community across the world. In turn, based on an all-subjected principle of democratic inclusion, I argue that refugees should be secured state-level voting rights in member states, albeit with a condition of the period of residency. Moreover, they should have immediate voting rights at the supranational institutions of the EU such as the European Parliament.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• voting rights
• political rights
• European Union
• democratic legitimacy
• supranational institutions

Acknowledgments

I am thankful for the feedback I received on earlier versions of this article from the audiences in Amsterdam, Braga, Edinburgh, Göttingen, Manchester, and Istanbul. For individual comments, I would like to thank Ayelet Shachar, Axel Gosseries, Benedikt Buechel, Benjamin Boudou, Eszter Kollar, Kieran Oberman, Marcus Carlsen Häggrot, Sebastian Rudas, Sine Bagatur and Tamar de Waal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See the projection by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Global Appeal 2022. Accessible at: https://www.unhcr.org/globalappeal2022/.

2. According to the UNHCR, the number of refugees across the world have reached 26.4 million in 2020. Accessible at: https://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html.

3. The exception is Finland where the residence requirement is at least 2 years on the 51st day before the elections. For electoral rights in the EU, see https://globalcit.eu/conditions-for-electoral-rights/.

4. For example, as Ragab and Antara observes, despite the fact that Germany is a major host of refugees in the EU, between the years 2000 and 2015, merely 21,754 Syrian nationals has been naturalized into German citizenship (Ragab & Antara, 2018, p. 11).

5. There is an ongoing scholarly debate on conceptualizing refugeehood. While some defend the Convention definition (Cherem, 2016), others argue for broadening it to include those who flee human rights deprivations (Shacknove, 1985). Note that the issue of political disenfranchisement applies to both definitions.

6. See Ziegler’s discussion of de facto disenfranchised refugees (Ziegler, 2017, pp. 133–159).

7. See also, Ziegler (2017) for a case for enfranchising refugees in states of asylum that draws upon a variety of normative and pragmatic considerations.

8. For various formulations of the principle, see, Benhabib (2004, p. 217), Lopez-Guerra (2005), Fraser (2008, pp. 407–413), Abizadeh (2008), Näsström (2011), and Owen (2012).

9. An all-affected-interest principle may be formulated as: all whose interests are affected by the outcome of a decision should be included in the decision-making processes. For alternative formulations, see, Arrhenius (2005), Goodin (2007), and Song (2009).

10. Alternatively, the all-affected-interest principle may ground claims for representation of interests. For a discussion of this view, see, Owen (2012) and Bauböck (2018).

11. See Erman (2014) for a discussion of the condition of bindingness. Also, Lopez-Guerra for the emphasis on binding legislative processes for an all-subjected principle (Lopez-Guerra, 2005, p. 224).

12. Here I am employing an illuminating distinction by Owen between ‘an equal right of participation in the demos’ and ‘a right of equal participation in the demos’ (Owen, 2012, p. 147).

13. For example, according to UNHCR, in 2019, while the number of refugees across the world reached 29 million, the number of returned refugees remained at 317,281. (https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/download/?url=JvW7).

14. While Ziegler (2017) and Bender (2021) discuss (a) and (b) as grounds of inclusion, they do not take into account (c).

15. Some refugees choose to seek asylum in political communities where they have already existing social ties. Yet, these cases are exceptions.

16. See New Pact on Migration and Asylum (available at: https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/promoting-our-european-way-life/new-pact-migration-and-asylum_en).

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Ali Emre Benli

Ali Emre Benli’s research focuses on the ethics of immigration, democratic theory and theories of civil disobedience. He is the co-editor of Claiming Citizenship Rights in Europe. His work has been published in Journal of Global Ethics and Journal of Refugee Studies.