The Right to International Protection. Institutional Architectures of Political Asylum in Europe (Part I, 1970-1992)

This report is a preliminary study covering the period from 1975 to 1992 and offers the historical material to analyze how different institutional architectures have affected the quality of asylum determination and to identify the institutional architectures that have performed best in the past. While prescribing common goals and specific methods for the protection of refugees, the Global Compact on Refugees (GRC) proposes few procedures or institutional arrangements for governance. The EU’s reforms on asylum procedures, on the other hand, give a more detailed description of the asylum determination procedure that the Member States are expected to deploy. Neither the GRC nor the European Union’s Asylum Procedures Directive, however, give any prescription on the nature of the institutional architecture in which asylum decisions are to be made. In this working document we analyzed the position of the asylum offices through the second half of the 20th century when nation states in Western Europe, with little interference of the European Community/Union still decided sovereign about their protection policy.