The Commission Tries Again to Reform the Dublin System: Much Ado About Nothing?

Since its introduction, in the few articles of the Convention implementing the Schengen Agreement, (what would later become) the Dublin System has marked the cooperation of European States in the field of asylum, first outside and then within the Community. With the tools provided by the Treaty of Amsterdam, EC institutions further developed this System, amending it a few times up to its current version, adopted with the new legal basis introduced by the Treaty of Lisbon, i.e., Article 78 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. The System, which was not initially designed to cope with the massive migratory flows that would affect the Union in subsequent years, is among the most criticized ‘products’ of European law. Judged as profoundly unfair by the (Mediterranean) States of first entry, unspeakable by many Eastern European countries (especially those belonging to the Visegrád Group), and barely tolerated by States of last destination, it is difficult to find a Union act with a worse reputation than the Dublin Regulation in its different versions. This chapter investigates the reasons for this failure from the perspective of the European Commission’s new and recent attempt to modify the Dublin System.