Dublin in "crisis" - investigating the Dublin regulation as a crisis management system

Abstract: During the year 2015 a large degree of attention was cast at the European asylum system, and especially the Dublin regulation, after an unusually large amount of asylum seekers managed to arrive to the EU. The Dublin regulation, which is the instrument that allocates responsibility for asylum seekers across the Member States in the EU, failed to uphold its own criteria and the asylum systems in certain Member State more or less collapsed. The Dublin regulation was however not originally designed to handle crisis situations, and had instead expressly maintained that it did not have burden sharing as an objective. These objectives were instead supposed to be handled through other means, but as time went on and no such instruments were adopted or used. Instead the Dublin regulation was outfitted with a crisis management mechanism, the Early Warning Mechanism, that was itself a compromise between the Commission and Council, and aimed at upholding the Dublin system through administrative and economical assistance to pressured Member States. When this was found to not be enough to handle the crisis emerging due to the large amount of arrivals of asylum seekers, the Council adopted an ad hoc decision to relocate a percentage of the asylum seekers across the EU according to a distribution key. This relocation type mechanism is now also proposed to be included in the Dublin regulation. This thesis aims at examining and critically analyzing the Dublin system’s evolution as a crisis management system, and how the crisis management function interplays with the Dublin regulation’s original, primary objectives. The thesis main findings are that the Dublin allocation criteria may play a role in creating crisis situations, and that the EU legislators seems to have addressed this by imposing emergency relocation and support packages instead of addressing the systemic issues and root causes.