The ‘spirit of the Schengen rules’, the humanitarian visa,and contested asylum governance in Europe – The Swiss case

ABSTRACT

The paper examines why Switzerland along with several other European countries introduced a Schengen visa to substitute for individual applications for asylum at the country’s embassy as a pathway to protect Syrian refugees. The case study highlights the inherent interest asymmetries in a tenuous arrangement of multi-layered governance, revealing a conflict over the interpretation of Schengen law in a collective governance environment – a conflict that was recently resolved by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). Drawing on multi-layered governance, the paper discusses why the Swiss divergence from the ‘spirit’, but not the ‘letter’ of the Schengen code (a metaphor used by the EU Commission), could be considered as an example of ‘de-coupling’ from the negotiated, intergovernmental order. Whereas de jure the unity of the Schengen visa code is maintained, the amount of discretion which Switzerland and other Schengen countries have used to interpret the regulatory purpose behind the Schengen humanitarian visa went too far for the CJEU and the EU Commission. The case study illustrates how the interpretation of rules matters in a multi-layered framework of governance, possibly giving the ability to react to changing circumstances, but also bearing the potential for conflict.     

Fixed-width interval estimation of the minimum point of a regression function based on the Kiefer-Wolfowitz procedure

A version of the central limit theorem for the Kiefer-Wolfowitz procedure is stated. One constructs an asymptotically consistent fixed-width confidence interval for the minimum of a regression function. It is shown that the first moment of the corresponding stopping rule is finite. Both the construction and properties of the estimates of unknown parameters and an adaptive version of the procedure are presented.