Suchergebnisse

A decade of conflict has forced an estimated 350,000 people to flee Chechnya. For Chechen asylum seekers Central Europe has become the transit point for those seeking entry to the EU. Expansion of the EU has failed to offer protection & imposed further burdens on asylum systems in new member states. Adapted from the source document.

This paper is written against the background of the on-going evaluation of the EU Visa Code and an emerging paradigm shift in EU visa policy with visas becoming a tool for economic growth and job creation. The paper analyses, more particularly, current challenges for the proper functioning of the EU's common visa policy by focusing on the three pillars on which this policy is based: its cornerstone, the Visa Code; consular cooperation on the ground, as an indispensable supplement of the latter; and, finally, the Visa Facilitation Agreements, a potential tool for its smooth operation in certain countries. Due to the limited mid-term review of the Stockholm Programme, initially foreseen for 2012, the Stockholm guidelines for visa policy are integrated in the relevant analysis.

This article intends to give an overview about developments in European Regulatory and Health Technology Assessment (HTA) of new cancer drugs. As background information, it will refer to an overview article by Bergmann et al. [1], which pointed out the status and the limitations of the current system. The authors discussed possible steps to improve the interface between regulators and HTA bodies but stated that this alone will not be sufficient to overcome heterogeneous HTA assessments between HTA agencies. Major issues and challenges for the foreseeable future will be to overcome the heterogeneity of patient access decisions of pharmaceutical payers across Europe which is due to (i) considerably different scientific approaches and methodology to the more or less formal evaluation of cost-effectiveness; (ii) differing health priorities across the countries that reflect historically developed cultural differences and values or different unmet medical needs and (iii) different economic strengths among nations, regions and locales that necessarily drive health care budgetary decisions. The authors consider that this needs a science-based common position on methodology, greater commitments by politicians and health care decision makers to ensure equal access for patients across the EU to anti-tumour medicines. .

This Work Project analyzes the unequal access to healthcare in Europe between 2004 and 2012, considering the migrant population in particular. Using the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), the migrant status is determined primarily by the country of birth and secondarily established by citizenship, and the access to healthcare is measured by the unmet need for medical treatment. The empirical methodology follows an econometric approach. We start to observe that the difference between migrants and natives in the access to healthcare disadvantages the formers, although not substantial. On the other hand, it is found that the differences between age groups, for the total sample, turn out to affect relatively more the unmet needs than the migration issue. Considering the particular context of the European Union, if the migrant is not an EU citizen, the inequality in the access to healthcare is relatively more marked. This latter inequality is amplified when the reason that leads to unmet need results from financial constraints.

Against the backdrop of international migration and the rise of right-wing populism, debates on citizenship policies intensified. This article seeks to explain why some Central and Eastern European countries adopted more inclusive access to nationality rules for non-ethnic immigrants than others. Encompassing the period from 1990 to 2014, the analysis focuses on four factors: left–right ideological position of governments, electoral strength of far-right parties, the size of expatriate/kin minority populations, and the importance of national minority issues. Using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, the article found that strong far-right parties, important national minority issues, and sizable expatriate/kin minority populations all contributed to restrictive citizenship policies in Central and Eastern Europe. However, none of these factors were necessary or sufficient. Meanwhile, inclusive access to nationality rules were adopted in those countries where far-right parties failed to register important electoral successes and national minority issues were relatively insignificant.

These essays examine women's political representation in Eastern Europe, particularly since the fall of the Berlin Wall. In addition to shedding light on the democratization of Eastern Europe, the volume explores a range of theories of democratic representation