Graded Solidarity? The Social Rights of Refugees in EU law

Solidarity is an important value within the European Union, evidenced by
its inclusion in Article 2 of the Treaty on the European Union and as title
IV in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Solidarity
has been described as the demand to ‘respond to the needs of others’ or
the ‘readiness to share resources with others’. Even though in the refugee
context, the concept of solidarity is often used to refer to burden sharing
between EU Member States as regards receiving refugees, it can, therefore,
also refer to demands for fairness in the distribution of benefits. This
chapter takes this latter approach and analyses the concept of solidarity
within the European Union, as concretized as social rights to benefits.

As regards refugees, EU legislation and case law has, through the years,
established a variety of levels of social rights for different categories of
refugees. This chapter aims to map the different levels of social rights for
refugees in EU law, in order to gain more insight into the scope of and
basis for this kind of solidarity in EU law. It will show how solidarity with
refugees as crystallized in their social rights is highly conditional, and, at
times, instrumental. It will also show how this kind of conditional solidarity
as regards refugees’ social rights increases as a response to crisis narratives