Who We Are

The International Alliance of Safe Harbours (IASH) was founded in Palermo at the From the Sea to the City (FS2C) Conference in June 2021. The conference was co-hosted by Palermo and Potsdam city councils and co-organized by the From the Sea to the City (FS2C) civil society consortium, with whom we work closely together. As a civil-institutional tandem, we encourage other cities to join us in building stronger alliances with their local civil society and engage more actively in European migration governance. As a cross-border network, we increase the visibility of welcoming municipalities and their interests at the EU level.

As European cities and communities, we have offered a new home to asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants for decades. We are unconditionally committed to humanitarian values, universal human rights, and the right to asylum, even in difficult times. We count on the ideal of a network of cooperating cities in Europe. Instead of concentrating the burden on arrival or transit municipalities, through hotspots and camps along the Mediterranean and beyond, we advocate for a fair share of responsibility among many European cities and regions. With this in mind, IASH member cities signed the Palermo Declaration at the FS2C conference in 2021. This founding document outlines our common vision for a welcoming Europe.

From the founding conference in Palermo in 2021 on, the joint work with FS2C has become a defining feature of IASH, advocating for a humanitarian asylum policy in Europe and striving to open up new paths for cities in Europe to actively get involved in accommodating and integrating refugees.