Legal Framework for EU Asylum Policy

Abstract

The fundamentally revised and extended second edition of the ‘Commentary on EU Immigration and Asylum Law’ comprises four thematic introductions, which are written in the style of an advanced textbook and which are meant to help practitioners, doctoral students and academics who are not familiar with immigration and asylum law to orientate themselves in a highly complex and politically sensitive area of the law. The introduction into the ‘Legal Framework for EU Asylum Policy’ starts with general remarks on the evolution of asylum policy and the opt-outs for the UK, Ireland and Denmark. It continues, on this basis, with one of the most detailed and reliable analyses of the scope of Union competences under Article 78 TFEU, whose provisions serve as the legal bases for supranational legislation on asylum. The contribution also introduces readers to overarching principles regarding mixed flows and the prescription of inter-state solidarity in Article 80 TFEU. It concludes with a description of the international legal framework with an emphasis on the Geneva Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights for asylum policy. In doing so, it discusses, for instance, the status and interpretation of the Geneva Convention within the EU legal order and the pertinence of the human rights enshrined in the ECHR for status determination, reception conditions and asylum procedure.

Keywords: EU law, asylum, competences, human rights, interpretation