Consolidating the European asylum regime’s coercive trajectory until the pandemic

Abstract

How have European asylum policies developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, from the perspective of the long-term political trajectory of the European asylum regime? When the pandemic broke out, EU member states had for three decades been trying to resolve the shortcomings of the 1990 Dublin Convention. The weaknesses in the regime persisted both due to the overloading of frontline member states and the efforts to control secondary flows of asylum seekers within the EU. The pandemic has provided neither a hiatus nor a turning point in this regard but has produced a fluid situation that precipitated the United Kingdom’s withdrawal and the consolidation of the long-term trend of coercion of asylum seekers, between member states and at their external borders.