EU asylum system fails those who need it the most

March 25, 2020 / By mobanmarket

EU asylum system fails those who need it the most

Court ruling shows that the EU is doing too little to help vulnerable people.

Greece’s asylum system is in such disarray that migrants seeking protection in the European Union should not be sent back there. So the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled, in a decision that sets a precedent for hundreds of other cases. The ruling threatens to undermine one of the pillars of the EU’s asylum system – the principle, enshrined in the Dublin II regulation, that asylum-seekers should submit their application in the country through which they entered the EU, and that they can be sent back there should they have ventured further inwards. This principle rests on the assumption that all member states of the EU are providing equivalent levels of procedural and substantive protection to persons fleeing persecution. That may be legal fiction – but it is a convenient fiction that also underpins many other EU initiatives in the field of justice and home affairs, such as the European Arrest Warrant. 

The ruling is embarrassing for Greece but will hardly come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the conditions that greet migrants there. The Greek authorities openly admit that they are overwhelmed by the inflow of undocumented migrants, primarily across the short land border with Turkey. Some of these are genuine refugees, fleeing persecution, while others are economic migrants. Many have reached Greece with the help of people-traffickers. Most have taken great personal risks to reach Europe, and deserve at least to be heard. Denying them a hearing is one of the ways in which the Greek system fails them. Other EU member states have a moral obligation to make up for that failure by offering protection. A number of governments have now done precisely that, including Germany, the United Kingdom and Belgium – the country that returned the applicant in the case considered by the ECHR. Those countries have suspended returns to Greece and agreed to hear asylum cases from people who entered the Union through that country.

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The suspension gives Greece some breathing-space to strengthen its protection systems. The country is building new reception centres to replace, or at least relieve, those with the worst conditions. It is building up, with assistance from the European Commission, its administrative capacity for handling asylum applications. More importantly, the suspension increases the protection of scores of asylum-seekers who have entered the Union through Greece before travelling further north or west.

That breathing-space should not encourage complacency. The EU’s member states need to decide, as they discuss revisions to the Dublin II regulation currently before them in the Council of Ministers, whether to give more weight to the protection of individuals or to provide incentives for a functional system in Greece and elsewhere. The Commission has proposed that it should have the authority to recommend temporary suspensions of returns to a particular member state, and that such suspensions, unlike those that are currently possible, should apply across the Union. Most member states, including France, Germany and the UK, reject that proposal: they say that it would reduce the pressure on the laggards to reform their asylum systems. They also worry that it would undermine the very goal that Dublin II is supposed to serve – the prevention of ‘jurisdiction shopping’, whereby migrants pick the EU member state that offers the most attractive assistance or the best chance of having an asylum application approved.

In making this political point, the member states are putting the integrity of an EU-wide system ahead of the protection of individuals who most need it – those fleeing persecution abroad. The Commission proposal, by contrast, goes in the right direction by strengthening safeguards. It makes it easier for asylum-seekers to join family members in the EU. And it increases the protection of unaccompanied minors.

Some reflection on the unintended consequences of the regulation is called for. By shifting the responsibility for examining asylum applications to the countries that find themselves on the EU’s frontiers, Dublin II is the very opposite of burden-sharing: it piles pressure on those countries, Greece currently foremost among them, that are least able to cope with it. The people who suffer are the weakest, who need the EU’s protection the most.