Michelle L Rakue

The current refugee crisis led to a peak of more than 1 million asylum applications within the European Union in the years of 2015 and 2016, numbers that reduced in the following years only because of agreements such as the EU-Turkey Statement that blocked the land borders between Turkey and the Balkans and the agreement struck between the EU, Italy and Libya envisaging to train Libyan authorities to intercept boats carrying migrants. This situation brought not only concerns on whether or not EU Member States were complying with their minimum obligations towards International Refugee Law, but also raised disputes on burden-sharing regarding asylum management within the EU, questioning the fairness of the mechanisms on responsibility allocation enforced through the Dublin Regulation. Therefore this work discusses how such circumstances of massive inflows facilitated the occurrence of violations of minimum procedural guarantees, necessary in order to ensure asylum-seekers are not subject to refoulement, as demonstrated in Hirsi and Khlaifia, among others cases. It also addresses how the Dublin Regulation has contributed for an unequal distribution of asylum applications among EU Member States, as well as how this has been affecting the manner in which most overburdened countries like Italy and Greece have been dealing with the referred obligations and how other Member States have been reacting towards this scenario. Lastly, it conducts an assessment of the Italian case-law in order to illustrate how obligations under International Refugee Law and rules of the EU Asylum Protection System are being enforced at a domestic level, highlighting relevant domestic legislation and the manner in which they have been ultimately applied.