Samenvatting

There have been refugee movements for centuries, yet since the Second World War the number of refugees augmented significantly and international action was undertaken by organizations like the League of Nations and its successor the United Nations, which established the United Nations Higher Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Despite the existence of refugee movements, asylum policy does not have a long history. Since the 1950s, some European countries agreed on cooperating on several economic matters, which has been extended to political cooperation during the 1980s. With the introduction of the internal market in 1993, people could move freely within the European Union (EU) without any internal border controls. Adequate measures were necessary to control the movements of people, thus specific legislation had to be introduced.
The EU started to make plans on developing a common system on asylum at the Tampere Council meeting in 1999, based on the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its Protocol of 1967. In the two phases 1999-2005 and 2005-2012, European legislation has been developed and special institutions were created to improve the harmonization of national policies. The European Council adopted various regulations and directives to regulate which Member State is responsible for the asylum application (Dublin Regulation) and to set up common minimum standards for e.g. reception conditions, asylum procedures and qualification. The institutions Frontex and the European Asylum Support Office were established to facilitate the cooperation between the EU Member States, in order to realize one homogeneous asylum system. The political direction and the focus of work have been determined in several Council Programmes. The Tampere Council resulted in the Tampere Programme, a five year policy programme that would last until 2004. It was succeeded by The Hague Programme (2004-2009) and the Stockholm Programme (2010-2014).
Despite the introduction of European common rules on asylum, there are still some obstacles that have to be eliminated before a well-functioning asylum system can operate. There are quite some differences in the national asylum situations. Especially southern border countries face problems, looking at for example the problematic situations in Greece and Malta, which receive big flows of immigrants.
The introduction of the CEAS has had some consequences in the Member States. In order to be in accordance with European legislation, Member States had to transpose the adopted measures into national legislation. Spain had to amend its national asylum law and introduced the "Nueva Ley de Asilo' (New Asylum Law) in October 2009.
The EU has made big progress over a number of years by developing a common asylum system which should provide the same conditions for asylum seekers in every Member State of the EU. Nevertheless, before the realization of an asylum system that operates equally in every EU Member State, some problems remain to be solved.