30 October 2015

ECRE has published its fourth Asylum Information Database (AIDA) Legal Briefing on the legality of examining asylum claims in detention and its impact on human rights. While the refugee status determination procedure attracts certain guarantees for an asylum seeker, these guarantees depend to a great extent on the procedural environment in which the asylum process takes place in. Given the increased use of administrative detention in some Member States when assessing an asylum claim, the brief intends to analyse the effects of detention on asylum procedures and on the determination of a claim.

The brief argues that given the individual rights at stake within an asylum process, such as the right to be heard and the right to an effective remedy under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, the complexity of the procedure, language barriers and the numerous amount of tasks which the asylum seeker must undertake as a consequence of a detention order, refugee status determination procedures and appeals carried out in detention often cannot guarantee basic procedural rights.  The brief concludes that detention can be unlawful from the perspective of procedural rights as the conditions that detention gives rise to are difficult to reconcile with the safeguards required by an asylum procedure.

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This article appeared in the ECRE Weekly Bulletin of 30 October 2015. You can subscribe to the Weekly Bulletin here.