Dublin Regulation
[7] The provisions of the Regulation were also extended by a treaty to non-member states Switzerland on 1 March 2008,[8] which on 5 June 2005 voted by 54.6% to ratify it, and Liechtenstein on 1 April 2011.
[14] The United Kingdom withdrawal from the European Union took effect at the end of the Brexit transition period on 31 December 2020, at which point the Regulation ceased to apply to it.
[17] The revised Regulation applies to all EU member states except those with opt-outs from the AFSJ policy area: Denmark and Ireland.
[21] According to the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) and the UNHCR the current system fails to provide fair, efficient and effective protection.
v Belgium and Greece, judged on 21 January 2011 that both the Greek and the Belgian governments violated the European Convention on Human Rights by applying the EU's own law on asylum seekers and were given fines of €6,000 and €30,000, respectively.
[30][31][32] Recently, voices have been heard calling for the imposition of tougher sanctions, should similar cases of trying to follow EU asylum laws occur in the future.
The Tarakhel family appealed under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, saying that they would be subject to “inhuman and degrading treatment” should they be forced to return to Italy due to their “systemic deficiencies” in asylum management.
Additionally, the court believed that the presence of children, a “particularly underprivileged and vulnerable” demographic, meant that the governments should be even more careful in ensuring safe reception across borders.
[34] Switzerland is not a part of the European Union, but it did sign into the Schengen Zone, making it subject to the laws outlined in the Dublin Regulation.
Around 23 June 2015 during the European refugee and migrant crisis, Hungary considered itself overburdened with asylum applications after receiving 60,000 "illegal immigrants" that year and announced to no longer receive back applicants who had crossed the borders to other EU countries and were detained there, as they should according to the Dublin regulation, due to unspecified "technical reasons", thus practically withdrawing from that Dublin regulation.
[36] On 24 August 2015, Germany therefore decided to make use of the "sovereignty clause" to process Syrian asylum applications for which it would not be responsible under the criteria of the Regulation.
[39] In April 2018 at a public meeting of the Interior-Committee of the German Bundestag, expert witness Kay Hailbronner asked about a future European asylum system, and described the current state of the Dublin Regulation as dysfunctional.
Hailbronner concluded, that once the EU has been reached, travelling to the desired destination, where the chances for being granted full refugee status are best and better living conditions are expected, was common practice.
[41] In September 2024, with some 242,000 migrants obligated to leave the country, the German government announced the reintroduction of border controls to its European neighbours in an attempt to turn back new arrivals.
Nathan Giwerzew described the Dublin III regulation in that context as "dysfunctional" - migrants who arrive in Europe are usually not registered by the country they first reach and are just waved through to Germany.
[42] Of the 128,000 migrants, caught by German police near the borders in 2023, only 7.9% had been registered before by another European County and the fingerprints of the rest could not be found in the Eurodac database.
