The so-called “refugee crisis” in 2015 unveiled the shortcomings of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). Europe struggled to cope with the 1.3 million people who applied for asylum. The Member States adopted their own meassures to get through the crisis. While some countries, such as Germany and Sweden, exceeded their capacity of refugee-reception, others let them pass through their borders to other countries. Moreover others built fences to stop the influx of people looking for protection. This scenario demonstrated the need to reform CEAS from a responsibility-sharing perspective.

This Delmi (The Migration Studies Delegation) report looks into the state of play of responsibility-sharing for asylum seekers in Europe and the harmonisation of EU Member States’ decision-making in asylum cases. Thus, the concepts of solidarity and fairness frame this timely and topical analysis. It reviews Member States’ performance in the past, both with regard to the number of asylum seekers they have admitted, and in terms of guaranteeing the applicants fair decisions on their protection claims.

The report also discusses several possible solutions to the problems at hand and outlines a number of scenarios for further EU action, based on changes being made to the Dublin Regulation. 

The report has been written by Bernd Parusel, Migration and Asylum Expert at the Swedish Migration Bureau. He holds a PhD from the Institute for Migration and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) at the University of Osnabrück, and Jan Schneider, Head of the Research Unit at the Expert Council of German Foundations on Integration and Migration. He holds as PhD from Giessen University’s Institute of Political Science