Addressing the Legal Quagmire of Complementary Legal Pathways

Complementary pathways have been offered as a possible solution for facilitating legal admission of people in need of international protection. The current debates about these pathways are characterised by a conceptual and legal quagmire since various issues are invoked and conflated. The objective of this article is to dissect the relevant issues in light of the existing relevant legal frameworks to achieve better clarity. For this purpose, the pathways are compared with resettlement and territorial asylum, to demonstrate their distinctiveness. This possible distinctiveness (i.e., the combination of protection-related and not protection-related considerations) disrupts the existing legal categories for regulating migration. The article shows how the European Convention on Human Rights, EU law and domestic law might respond to this disruption, by examining the granting of visas, the right to leave any country, the right to non-refoulement, the right to family life and relevant procedural rights.