The Right to International Protection. Institutional Architectures Historical Analysis in Selected EU Countries (Part II, until 2018)

This report 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. Through historical analysis we assess which institutional architectures of asylum determination may be instrumental in achieving high international standards in asylum policy implementation.

Both this document (Part 2) and the previous one (Part 1) are working documents. Our objective with both documents is to provide strong foundations for a comparative analysis. In this working document we analyze the position of the asylum offices from the 1990s onward. Part 1 gave an overview of asylum policy and the position of the AO between 1951 and 1993, at a time when nation states in Western Europe still decided sovereign about their protection policy. This report analyses asylum policy from 1993 onward when the ten national states of our sample1 still decided largely themselves, with little interference of the European Community2 on their immigration and asylum policy. However, some coordination started with the Schengen and Dublin agreements.