The Dublin system: the(un)solved refugee crisis in Europe

Author: Elvita Mertins 

Image by Peter Schrank

The refugee crisis in Europe, caused by the emergence of the conflicts from North Africa and the Middle East, has been one of the most important issues and centered attention of European headlines in 2015. However, today, it seems that attention shifted to other issues and we have simply forgotten about it. 

Does it mean that Europe has finally managed to solve the refugee crisis? What steps have been taken to solve the refugee crisis? 

If we look at the European Union statistics on the number of asylum applications, a total number of first-time applicants went down from 1.2 million in 2016 to 650 thousand in 2017. In fact, first-time asylum applications in some member states, for instance Belgium and Sweden, have dropped significantly. However, more detailed analysis of this migration flow suggests a different kind of scenario. While total asylum seekers arrivals in the EU has decreased, more migrants between 2016 and 2017 attempted to cross the sea from Turkey to Greece, or from Libya to Italy. Also, there was a significant increase in boat migration from Morocco to Spain. The Mediterranean crossing remained deadly, with 3,139 people dead or missing in 2017, while thousands of asylum seekers are stuck in Italy’s and Greece’s refugee camps. All this blurs the illusion that the problems of the last several years have vanished or disappeared. EU officials have been working on one issue in particular – reformation of the Common European Asylum System, or so-called ‘the Dublin system’, which the EU has been attempting to fix since its beginning. The system consists of regulations, which has been evolved over the time replacing one another, and they are considered to be the cornerstone of the whole system (Dublin Convention, 1990; Dublin regulation II, 2003; Dublin regulation III, 2013). 

The Achilles‘ heel of the Dublin system and the most controversial debated issue is and has always been the lack of solidarity and the fair sharing of responsibility between the member states. In other words, there is a principle that the responsible member state will be the state through which the asylum seeker first entered the EU. And that is where the problem lies. The vast majority of illegal immigrants or asylum seekers enter Europe through countries like Greece, Malta, Italy and Spain. These countries are economically too weak to deal with the extensive number of immigrants on their own. Almost from the beginning of the Dublin system, southern European countries complained that they could not cope with a large refugee flows. For example, back in 2013, when the Dublin III Regulation was adopted, all the countries of the southern periphery of the Union supported a proposal which would allow illegal immigrants to apply for asylum in the country in which they have been apprehended, instead of in the country in which they had entered the European Union. However, this proposal was not approved and included in the amendment of the Dublin III Regulation. Since all three previous versions of Dublin regulation proved incapable of organizing burdensharing, in May 2016, the EU Commission has published a proposal for Dublin IV regulation. The Dublin IV introduces a mandatory asylum seekers relocation from countries receiving disproportionate numbers to other member states. At the moment, the proposal of the Dublin IV regulation is ‘at a reading stage’ and the regulation needs to be approved by both the European Parliament and the Council to take effect. Ever since the Commission brought the new proposal for the Dublin IV regulation, tensions between EU member states occurred. Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland did not agree with the EU established refugee quota, while the United Kingdom not only refused the quota system proposed by the EU, but also decided to leave the EU. The new proposal of Dublin IV regulation clearly challenges the solidarity between the member states, and with rampant populism and xenophobia all over Europe, it is doubtful that all states will share responsibility of refugee problem this time. A lack of solidarity between the member states may be another stimulus towards weakening the community as a whole. The EU’s inability to find the solution of the refugee problem have contributed to the debate concerning the fundamental principles - such as solidarity, integrity and cohesion - on which the European Union is premised. The question even arises of whether the EU is capable to provide efficient solutions to this kind of issue, pointing to the EU’s stability and coherence altogether. Thus, not to lose faith of its own citizens and its credibility among other international and regional organizations, the EU leaders must find proper measures to solve the refugee problem.

Sources

European Parliament, Legislative train schedule towards a new policy on migration; 

European Parliament, Reform of the Dublin system, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2016/586639/EPRS_BRI%282016%2958 6639_EN.pdf ; 

European Commission, Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council towards a reform of the Common European Asylum System, https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/sites/homeaffairs/files/what-we-do/policies/european-agendamigration/proposalimplementationpackage/docs/20160406/towards_a_reform_of_the_common_european_asylum_system_and_en hancing_legal_avenues_to_europe_-_20160406_en.pdf ; Eurostat, Asylum applications (non-EU) in the EU-28 Member States, 2006–2017, http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Asylum_statistics ; 

Human Rights Watch, European Union events of 2016. World Report, https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/european-union; 

Human Rights Watch, Europe’s migration crisis, https://www.hrw.org/tag/europes-migrationcrisis ; Centre for European Reform, Europe’s forgotten refugee crisis, http://www.cer.eu/sites/default/files/bulletin_114_cmm_article3_0.pdf; 

Kamil Matuszczyk, Migration crisis in 2017 – challenges for EU solidarity, https://www.opendemocracy.net/kamil-matuszczyk/migration-crisis-in-2017-challenges-for-eusolidarity.