Editing Search and rescue (section)

==3.2 Common European Asylum System==
The European Union has established a [[Common European Asylum System|Common European Asylum System (CEAS).]]

It is a legal and policy framework developed to guarantee harmonised and uniform standards for people seeking international protection in the EU. It is based on an understanding that the EU, an area of open borders and freedom of movement where countries share the same fundamental values, needs to have a common approach to implement transparent, effective and equitable procedures.

CEAS emphasizes a shared responsibility to process applicants for international protection in a dignified manner, ensuring fair treatment and similar procedures in examining cases, irrelevant of the country where the application is lodged. At its core, CEAS aims to achieve: a clear functional process to determine which country is responsible for examining an application for protection; a set of common standards to inform fair and efficient asylum procedures; a set of common minimum conditions for the dignified reception of applicants for protection and convergence on the criteria for granting protection associated with those statuses.

Within the context of CEAS, the [[Tampere Convention|Tampere Declaration]] set out the foundation for a comprehensive approach to migration by addressing political, human rights and developmental issues in countries and regions of origin and transit.68 Through this agreement with governments, legislative and policy measures were adopted at the EU level to set a framework to manage high influxes of displaced persons by accommodating persons in need of protection while supporting Member States experiencing pressure on their asylum systems.
After the first phase (from 1999 to 2005), Member States reflected on the functioning of CEAS and implemented improvements to the five legislations that govern the minimum standards of the European asylum system.<ref>{{cite web |title=European Union |url=https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies/migration-and-asylum/common-european-asylum-system_en |website=European Union |access-date=20 October 2023}}</ref>
The increased – and often uneven – pressure that national asylum and reception systems in EU+ countries faced since 2015 presented both a challenge and an opportunity for EU+ countries to take bold steps toward systemic and commonly-agreed solutions for further harmonisation, on the basis of solidarity and responsibility-sharing. Above all, it underlined the importance of the very existence of CEAS and a common migration policy – to have an EU-wide framework to manage mixed migratory flows, iv including border management, international protection and the return of rejected applicants. In the EU context, mixed migratory flows are defined as "complex migratory population movements, including refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants and other types of migrants as opposed to migratory population movements that consist entirely of one category of migrants".