European Asylum Protection System

The European Union has a systematic and a comprehensive ruling towards asylum protection. In specific, the whole system is composed by two parts, namely the Soft Law, which has no enforce effect, and the EU Legislation. For EU Legislation, it includes Regulations and Directives, which are play the main role for harmonising the asylum system, while jurisprudence from ECJ and national courts also have a saying towards it. In 1999, the EU put the asylum area under the first pillar, and initiated the two five year's programmes (from May 1999 to May 2004; and from May 2004 to May 2009). The final aim of the two programmes is to realise the Common European Asylum System on one hand, and to promote the harmonisation and corporation among the member states for the asylum protection. This Article includes three main parts: the criteria of refugee reorganization; the Dublin System; and the procedure for granting the asylum.In the criteria of refugee protection, the legal basis is Regulation EC 2004/38. The EU harmonized the definition, condition and rights towards refugees. Moreover, the Temporary protection and Subsidiary Protection have also been regulated within the Regulation. However, the harmonized definition towards refugee has been narrowly interpreted, and has only limited applied to the third country nationals, which is not in accordance with the 1951 Refugee Convention.In the second main part of this Article, the author illustrated the Dublin System, which is composed by the two main regulations, namely "Dublin Regulation" (EC.343/2003) and "EURODAC Regulation (EC.2752/2000).In Dublin Regulation, the main innovations are introducing the member states jurisdiction and liability regime, and establishing a stricter terms of period. While for the EURODAC Regulation, its main purpose is to establish a Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which is technologically supportive to the Dublin System.Finally, concerning the asylum protection system, the EU introduced two kinds of procedures: the common procedure and the special procedure. For the previous one, it is more commonly applied, and EU harmonised such common criteria in the Chapter 2 of the EC Regulation 2005/85, which enables the applications to enjoy the basic procedure protection. For the latter procedure, the author mainly focused on introducing the Safe Third Country regime, and explaining its violation of both EU law and international law.