European Asylum Support Office: An Effective Answer to Europeanization of Asylum Policy?

“Supranational agencies may solve problems of incomplete contracting.”1 All contracts are inevitably incomplete since they cannot spell out explicitly all the obligations of the parties throughout the life of the contract. Let us imagine that the contracting parties are the Union Member States and that the relevant obligation of the parties to the contract is the implementation of the Asylum Union acquis aimed at achieving the goal of a Common Asylum Support System. The agreement among the Member States fixes the general performance expectation but forgets to take into account a peculiar aspect of asylum law: its high dependency on the national administrative practices of dealing with applications for international protection. The contract among the Member States presents, thus, a gap that now has to be filled which is the convergence of administrative decision-making practices in granting asylum protection.

The identification by the European Council of this “practical gap” that stands in the way to the creation of a Common European Asylum System stimulated the Commission in 2006 to draft a Green Paper in order to address the issue of practical cooperation by making use of a new agency: the European Asylum Support Office.2 The aim of stimulating practical cooperation among the Member States asylum services is to improve convergence in the decision making process.3 The new brand European Asylum Support Office (EASO) aims at stepping-up administrative cooperation between Member States with a view to align national decision making process within the framework of the Union asylum legislation. But, will the European Asylum Support Office be able to fill the “practical gap”? In other words, will the European Asylum Support Office be able to address the major differences in the way Member States deal with applications for international protection? Will it be able to effectively promote convergence of practices, thus, completing the Europeanization of asylum law throughout the Union?

In order to address this question this paper will proceed as follows. The first part (I) will introduce the reader to the theoretical framework and to the methodology of this paper. The second part of the paper (II) will introduce the reader to the EASO. The third part (III) will try to suggest possible improvements to the tools that the office is planning to use in order to achieve more effectively convergence of asylum determination practices. In order to carry out this analysis, comparable tasks to the one of the EASO have been chosen from other agencies4 and the effectiveness of the comparable tasks in determining convergence of practices have been analyzed.

 1 Pollack M. (2003) ‘Delegation and Agency in the European Community’ in B. Nelsen and A. Stubb (ed.), The European Union: Readings on the Theory and Practice of European Integration, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 259.

2 COM(2007) 301 final, ‘On the future Common European Asylum System (presented by the Commission)’ Green Paper, Brussels, 6.6.2007.

3 COM(2007) 301 final, ‘On the future Common European Asylum System (presented by the Commission)’ Green Paper, Brussels, 6.6.2007.

4 EU-OSHA, FRONTEX and EMSA.