18 November 2013
New CJEU Ruling on Allocation of Responsibility pursuant to the Dublin II Regulation
On 14 November 2013, the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) held in the Bundesrepublik Deutschland v. Kaveh Puid case that a member state which is prohibited from returning an asylum seeker under the Dublin II Regulation to a country where the applicant would be at risk of being ill-treated, is not, in principle, obliged to assume responsibility for that application.
In those circumstances, as already stated in 2011 in C-411/10 N.S. and C-493/10 M.E. and others, and reiterated by the CJEU in its current ruling, the member state intending to send the asylum seeker back to another country must continue to examine the responsibility criteria set out in the Dublin Regulation to see if another member state can be made responsible.
If no other country can be identified as responsible for examining the application, the member state where the asylum seeker is located must assume responsibility for examining the application. The member state must also assume responsibility if the process of determining responsibility takes ‘an unreasonable length of time’.