Case summaries
Member States cannot merely refer to the existence of public order and security concerns under Article 72 TFEU, in order to derogate from their obligations under Title V without proving that it was necessary to do so. Such a derogation cannot be made unilaterally without any control by the European institutions. As the assessment of whether an applicant constitutes a danger to national security or public order should be thorough and individualised, in accordance with previous findings in C‑369/17 (Ahmed), Member States cannot invoke this provision in the context of general prevention but have to directly link it with a specific case.
Lastly, the spirit of solidarity and the binding nature of the Relocation Decisions do not allow Member States to derogate on the basis of a Member State’s own assessment of the effectiveness of the mechanism without suggesting a sound legal basis
Well-grounded information is of central importance to any decision to exclude a person convicted for criminal matters from international protection in accordance with Article 1 F of the 1951 Refugee Convention.
The detention of children is, in principle, permitted under Article 5 ECHR for the shortest amount of time, in appropriate conditions and facilities, and only after the Government has correctly concluded that less coercive measures are unavailable.
The complaint of the applicants under Article 3 are manifestly unfounded.
The right to be heard (Art. 103 par. 1 German Basic Law - Grundgesetz) guarantees every party access to all documents relevant for the decision, which includes status reports on the applicant’s country of origin in asylum cases.
The right to be heard also guarantees that the court takes all information and evidence into account presented by the applicant. § 74 Abs. 2 Asylum Act (Asylgesetz) limits the time period in which an applicant may present information and evidence to one month, however this only refers to information and evidence concerning the applicant’s personal experiences (individueller Lebensbereich). Information and evidence i.e. on the overall situation in the country may also be presented after a month.
The standardised nature of the questions to the applicants and similarities in the responses recorded do not necessarily indicate a lack of individualised assessment. The applicants were not deprived of an opportunity to submit arguments against their expulsion and did not make any claim of persecution risks in their country of origin. No collective expulsion under Article 4 Protocol 4 has been established.
Similarly, no violation of Article 4 Protocol 4 in conjunction with Article 13 has been established, as the claim cannot be considered arguable.
Germany is responsible for the asylum determination of an oppositional Turkish applicant under Art. 3 para. 2 subparas 2 and 3 Dublin III Regulation, because in this individual case the Bulgarian asylum procedure has systemic flaws that would entail a risk of inhuman or degrading treatment. A serious examination of the asylum application cannot be expected by the Bulgarian authorities and the authorities will likely return the applicant to Turkey. In such a case, there are reasonable grounds for believing that there would be a violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights due to the complainant’s own or family member’s opposition activities.
Given the emergency of the situation, family reunification could only be refused in circumstances where the relevant individual does not comply with principles of public order.
As a result, the Court concluded that there were serious doubts as to the legality of the decisions refusing family reunification.
The Dublin transfers, which have been suspended indefinitely due to the so-called Corona pandemic, constitute a domestic-related obstacle to execution in the sense of an objective impossibility which leads to a temporary suspension of deportation (Duldung) in accordance with § 60a para. 2 sentence 1 AufenthG.
The suspension constitutes a subsequent change in circumstances leading to the order of suspensive effect pursuant to § 80 para. 7 VwGO.
An application for a revision of a final court decision of the Swiss Federal Court is only admissible if the applicant presents new relevant facts or evidence which he was not able to provide in previous proceedings even if he had acted with due diligence.
If the new evidence relates to another person’s hearing files (in the case at hand a relative’s hearing protocol before the Swiss asylum authority) the fact that the files could not be retrieved during the proceedings cannot be attributed to the applicant if he lacked the required consent from the person concerned to access the files. By rule of principle, it is the asylum authority’s duty to consult relevant documents for the assessment of an application which is notably the case for statements made by family relatives if the factual circumstances on which the respective applications are based are closely related.
The Court concluded on the immediate release of an Egyptian national from detention. The judgment referred to the detention conditions for vulnerable persons that suffer from serious health conditions during the Covid-19 pandemic.