Flight and Asylum as a Europeanized Policy Area: Achievements and Harmonization Goals
Since the mid-1990s German asylum law has become increasingly framed by common European regulations on refugee protection. It is subject to jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights. Germany, however, successfully managed to introduce some restrictive elements of its national asylum policies also on the European level.
August 2014: Staff of the Migrant Offshore Aid Station throw bottles of water to refugees on a rubber boat off the coast of Malta. (© MOAS.EU/dpa)Within the European Union, it was only at a comparatively late stage that refugee policy issues became subject to integration efforts. The need for common European regulations only became obvious after Germany, France and the Benelux countries had signed the "Schengen Agreement" of 1985, to gradually abolish border controls on the movement of persons, and after the Heads of State and Government of the then twelve EC Member States had signed the Single European Act one year later, agreeing to the completion of a single European market. Henceforth, the abolition of border checks would allow asylum seekers to travel unobstructed from one Member State to another in order to claim asylum there.
Development of the Legal Framework
The Schengen Agreement, which was later integrated into the Community acquis, provided not only for the removal of internal border controls, but also for a harmonization of the regulations for granting visas. To minimize the potential security risks arising from the removal of internal border controls, the "Schengen States" agreed on better control of the external borders of the Community. The 1990 Convention Implementing the Schengen Agreement (CISA or "Schengen II") marked the starting point for a joint policy of immigration control[1], which included among its key components regulations for dealing with refugees and asylum seekers. The "Dublin Convention" of 1990 provided the foundation for this, establishing regulations to determine which Member State would be responsible for processing an asylum application[2]. These stipulated that the responsibility for examining an application for protection, and for providing accommodation, lay with the Member State that had played the most important role in the asylum seeker’s entry into Europe – for example if the applicant had travelled to close relatives already living in the country, or if he had been issued a visa or residence permit by this state. On the one hand, this was meant to ensure that only one state was responsible for any given asylum seeker, and to avoid the phenomenon of "refugees in orbit" – people living in the European Community with no official status, and with no state taking responsibility for looking after them and processing their applications for asylum. On the other hand, the aim was to make sure that each application for protection would receive only one substantive examination, so as to discourage "asylum shopping" – the submission of repeated or simultaneous applications in different Member States.It was particularly states such as Germany and France which, in the 1990s, insisted on the defining of responsibilities in accordance with the Dublin Convention, since they feared that their high standards of protection and accommodation would make them a "reserve country of asylum" (Reserveasylland) within the Community, in which the majority of asylum seekers would apply for asylum, or in which economically motivated migrants with no history of acute persecution would also try their luck.[3] In addition to this, Germany successfully campaigned on a European level for restrictive instruments such as the specification of "safe countries of origin" or "safe third countries", or accelerated procedures in the case of "manifestly unfounded asylum applications".[4] The Dublin Convention came into force on 1 September 1997, and has applied to all EU Member States since 1 January 1998. Since then, the state responsible for the asylum process is, in most cases, the state which an asylum seeker first entered, or where he or she can be proven to have first stayed.
With the Treaty of Amsterdam, also signed in 1997, the Member States formally agreed on the development of a common asylum and migration policy, as a step towards creating an area of freedom, security and justice. Since the Treaty came into force on 1 May 1999, the regulation of asylum and refugee policy issues has been one of the "communitized" areas of policy. The EC treaty included the obligation to comply with important international agreements, including the Geneva Refugee Convention and the European Convention on the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. The aim was to create, within five years, minimum standards in EU refugee policy, both for the reception of asylum seekers and for legal recognition and the implementation of asylum procedures; the treaty also provided for the further development of the Dublin Convention and the creation of a legal basis for the reception of displaced persons or other groups of people in need of protection.
At a special meeting of the European Council in Tampere in October 1999, the first concrete steps were taken towards the goal of creating a Common European Asylum System (CEAS), based on the "full and inclusive application of the Geneva Convention". The Commission was charged with drafting relevant directives. At the same time, the decisions of the European Council envisaged, in the longer term, the creation of common asylum procedures and a uniform status, valid throughout the Union, for those granted asylum.[5] In terms of European integration, the decisions made sense in several respects. On the one hand, they conformed to the logic of seeing the united Europe as one domestic area with as much opportunity as possible for the free movement of persons. On the other hand, the planned minimum standards offered the prospect of a tangible improvement in the legal situation of asylum seekers in many EU States.
Another important step for European asylum law was the work of the Convention on Fundamental Rights, which explicitly incorporated the right to asylum in accordance with the Geneva Convention of 1951 and the Protocol of 1967 into the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (Art. 18). This was proclaimed at the Nice Intergovernmental Conference in December 2000, and came into force with the Treaty of Lisbon in December 2009 – which gave it a kind of constitutional status.
Despite the fact that the Tampere agreements proved to be too ambitious, and there were delays in their implementation (not least due to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the ensuing discourse on security), four key legal instruments of the CEAS had been decided on by 2005. These still constitute the axes of the common asylum policy (see Table 1). They are:
1) the "Qualification Directive", which sets minimum standards for the recognition of asylum seekers and for the rights of recognized refugees and persons with subsidiary protection status;
2) the "Reception Conditions Directive", which defines standards for social conditions of reception, accommodation and care;
3) the "Asylum Procedures Directive", which aims at standardizing the implementation of asylum procedures, and
4) the Dublin II Regulation, which superseded the Dublin Convention.
In addition to this, the so-called Eurodac Regulation stipulated that the fingerprints of all asylum seekers would be recorded when they made their application, and would then be available to the asylum authorities of the Member States, together with other data, in an EU-wide database. The Eurodac system is meant to facilitate to determine which state is responsible for the asylum procedure. On 8 August 2001, an additional directive on temporary protection (also known as the Mass Influx Directive) came into force. After the refugee crises caused by the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, the EU wanted to establish a joint mechanism for the prompt admission of civil war refugees and displaced persons in similar crises. The aim was to fix a specific admission quota for each Member State. The directive, however, contained only an agreement on minimum standards for temporary admission. In other respects the principle of voluntary action remained intact, and Member States are still free to determine their own capacity to receive refugees.[6]
Table 1: Central legal acts of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) (© bpb)
