Case summaries

The applicant challenged his transfer to Greece from the UK under the Dublin II Regulation, on the basis that the situation for asylum seekers in Greece would lead to a violation of Article 3 ECHR. The Court declared the application manifestly ill-founded and therefore inadmissible, as it was presumed that Greece would comply with its obligations and would not refoule him to his county of origin Iraq. 

If a Member Sate has issued a visa that enables an applicant to enter its territory and that visa has expired less than six months previously, that Member State is responsible for the examination of the applicant’s asylum application as long as the applicant has not left the territory of the EU Member States. In this case, the visa issued by Slovenian authorities expired only 5 days before the asylum application was made in France. Slovenia was, therefore, the responsible Member State under Art 9(4) Dublin Regulation.

The interview report established by an officer of a Prefecture is admissible evidence even if it has not been signed and was conducted without the assistance of an interpreter. When an asylum applicant denies having made statements recorded in that report, he must provide evidence. In this case, the applicant did not provide evidence that he had not crossed Italy and, in a written letter addressed to the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons, he even mentioned having crossed Italy.

A decision to expel an applicant with post-traumatic stress disorder to Poland did not violate Art 3 ECHR. The Member States guarantee, in accordance with Art 15 of the Reception Conditions Directive, to provide asylum applicants with the necessary medical treatment. Only in very exceptional cases does an expulsion violate Art 3 ECHR, even less frequently in cases of expulsions under the Dublin II regulation.

Traumatised people and those who have suffered otherwise psychologically and physically from flight behave differently when giving evidence compared with healthy people. This can mean that the full submissions relevant to asylum are not provided at the start of the proceedings or the traumatisation itself is not mentioned. These circumstances are to be taken into account during the ban on new evidence.

The presence of an adult asylum applicant’s sibling in an EU Member State entails no obligation for that State to apply Art 7 Dublin Regulation, as siblings are not included in the definition of family members in Art 2(i). This was the case even though the applicant’s brother had been granted refugee status and, subsequently, citizenship in France.

The Austrian authorities must, in each case, examine whether there exists a real risk of a violation of Art 3 ECHR through indirect refoulement when expelling an asylum applicant and, if such a risk exists, the authorities should exercise the sovereignty clause in the Dublin Regulation. This applies even where a request to take back is made to another Member State of the Dublin Regulation. Although the Asylum Board's reasoning for refusing the applicant's appeal against a transfer to Slovakia was not very detailed, it was not arbitrary and therefore there was no violation of the applicant's Constitutional rights.

Although the applicant, an adult without children, did not fall within the definition of a family member under Art 2(i) Dublin Regulation and could therefore not rely on Art 7 and Art 8 to defeat a transfer order, his links to family members in France could justify applying Art 3(2) or Art 15. In such a case, the definition of a family member should not be interpreted in the restrictive sense of Art 2(i). In order to apply a broader definition, the applicant must provide evidence of the intensity of the links to the family. In this case, the applicant failed to provide such evidence.

In this case, the Council of State held that the separation of a family, which results from the implementation of the Dublin Regulation, is unlawful if it has not been ascertained that the family could be reunited in one of the two countries concerned under the Regulation.

When a transfer under the Dublin Regulation would result in a violation of fundamental rights, the Member State in which the applicant is present can examine the asylum application even though another State should have been responsible under the Dublin Regulation. In this case, the applicant’s wife was allowed to remain in France as she was in the advanced stage of pregnancy and, therefore, transferring the applicant would violate Art 8 ECHR.