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Report on Improving the Quality and Consistency of Asylum Decisions in the Council of Europe Member States

  • There are important shortcomings in terms of quality and consistency of the asylum decisions taken in the Council of Europe member states. As evidence of this, in 2007 acceptance rates varied considerably between 1% and 39% in countries receiving significant numbers of asylum seekers. The situation was even more dramatic when looking at certain specific groups of asylum seekers. For example, again in 2007, the acceptance rates for Iraqis seeking protection in Europe varied between 0 and 81%. The very low recognition rates in certain countries, or for certain groups of asylum seekers, may be due to difficulties in accessing the asylum process, poor procedural safeguards in the asylum proceedings, restrictive and divergent interpretation of eligibility criteria, lack of objective and reliable country of origin information, poor evidential assessment, in particular the culture of disbelief in asylum adjudication, political pressure, lack of training of the relevant authorities and their personnel, or a combination of these factors. The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe should be invited to prepare guidelines to address the difficulties outlined above. These guidelines should encourage Council of Europe member states to develop higher standards of protection, based on their own domestic standards of human rights or humanitarian impulse, reflecting the nature of the European Convention on Human Rights as a pan-European minimum standard. Furthermore the Committee of Ministers should consider a mechanism for monitoring the quality and consistency of asylum decisions, and to facilitate this task, consider guidelines on harmonisation of asylum data across Council of Europe member states, taking into account work already carried out at by the European Union. The Committee of Ministers should also review the asylum curriculum in member states and develop training programmes, tools and data-bases of jurisprudence of asylum decisions across Europe. Finally, there is a pressing need for the Committee of Ministers to establish a new inter-governmentalCommittee with a permanent mandate to examine asylum and refugee issues to replace the work formerly carried out by the Ad hoc Committee of experts on the legal aspects of territorial asylum, refugees and stateless persons (CAHAR).

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Metadaten
Document Type:Working Paper
Language:English
Author(s):Cathryn Costello
Publication year:2009
Publishing Institution:Hertie School
Related URL:https://www.refworld.org/docid/4b2a47f62.html
Release Date:2021/06/07
Hertie School Research:Centre for Fundamental Rights
Licence of document (German):Metadaten / metadata
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