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THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION
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Meanwhile, the much-anticipated Common
European Asylum System is not being evenly im-
plemented throughout Europe and Member
States continue to take significantly different
approaches to the issue. The European Union
has adopted a series of legal instruments since
1999 conceived as integral parts of a greater
Common European Asylum System capable of
harmonising legislation, conditions of reception
and other aspects of international protection
throughout the Union. This process is intended
to unify national systems and guarantee that
asylum seekers and refugees in all of these
countries receive equal treatment.
Despite this initiative, national asylum sys-
tems throughout Europe are not yet fully aligned
and refugees applying for international protec-
tion in the EU are being treated differently from
one country to the next.
Although a new set of directives and regula-
tions that signified a further step towards the
consolidation of a common system was ap-
proved in 2013, community legislation on inter-
national protection continues to be applied in a
patchwork fashion.
National systems differ and tend to be inad-
equate in areas such as recognition criteria, pro-
cedural access and safeguards, reception condi-
tions and integration policy.
Recognition rates varied significantly from
one country to the next in 2017 due to differ-
ences in criteria applied. Whereas Sweden rec-
ognised 44 % and Germany 50 % of the appli-
cations they respectively processed that year,
Hungary recognised a substantially lower 31 %.
Although the Spanish government has yet to re-
lease its recognition rate for 2017 (an issue of
concern in and of itself), its rate for the past few
years has steadily hovered around a paltry 33 %.
Recognition rates for specific nationalities
vary sharply across Europe. Data published by
the European Council on Refugees and Exiles
(ECRE) indicates that whereas Germany recog-
nises 70 % of the asylum applications presented
by Iraqis, Norway recognises a mere 18 % of the
applications presented by people of the same
nationality. The recognition rate for Afghan asy-
lum seekers is also higher in Germany than
Norway: 55 % compared to 30 %.
What we have, in effect, is a European asy-
lum lottery by which refugees’ experiences and
application outcomes depend almost entirely on
the country in which they try their luck.
The combination of divergent approaches
and practices being applied has given rise to a
situation in which fundamental legal, moral
and political principles such as the “right to
have rights” have been superseded by factors
such as luck, exceptionality, the discretion of
national authorities to interpret regulations to
suit their own agendas and the commercialisa-
tion of human rights. We have reached a point
at which it is hard to deny that the implementa-
tion of the Common European Asylum System
has lamentably meant more restrictions and
setbacks than progress from the perspective of
human rights.
A case in point is what is happening in the
Mediterranean, which has become an ill-defined
frontier along which policies determining recep-
tion and return, life and death and yes or no de-
cisions are formulated and reformulated, in many
instances on the basis of race or nationality.
The commercialisation of borders and rising
tide of “humanitarian” rhetoric that threatens
to supplant actual concern for rights are but
two factors clouding the future of human rights
and making it more difficult to resuscitate the
notion of social justice so closely linked to the
right to asylum.
In any case, understanding where we are to-
day requires an examination of past.