We are pleased to announce that Dr Cathryn Costello (Andrew W Mellon Associate Professor of International Human Rights and Refugee Law) has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant for the project Refugees are Migrants: Refugee Mobility, Recognition and Rights (REF-MIG). The project will start in March 2017.

This project has two principal aims, the first being to re-examine refugee protection through a lens of mobility and migration, and secondly, to bring scholarship on refugee law into conversation with the practices of the refugee regime, in particular to subject the latter to legal scrutiny. It will re-examine three key aspects of refugee law – access to protection, refugee status determination (RSD), and refugee rights – and bring them into conversation with the refugee regime’s norms and practices on responsibility-sharing and solutions.

Crucially, the project takes a long and broad view of the refugee regime, in order to open up new possibilities and trajectories. It also brings critical new insights into the regime, by undertaking a legal assessment of the role of non-state actors. In particular, it will provide an important and timely legal assessment of the role of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). It examines EU law and practice, as an actor in the global refugee regime, engaging not only with asylum-seekers and refugees on its territory, but via cooperation with transit and host states. It will examine law and practice in the EU, and in Turkey, Lebanon, Kenya and South Africa.

ERC (European Research Council) Starting Grants are awarded to researchers of any nationality with 2 to 7 years of experience since completion of their PhD (or equivalent degree) and a scientific track record showing great promise. The research must be conducted in a public or private research organisation located in one of the EU Member States or Associated Countries. The funding (up to €1.5 million per grant) is provided over a maximum of 5 years. 325 grants were awarded in the Starting Grant 2016 Call, from a total of 2,935 proposals submitted.