Case summaries

The criteria for detention under Article 28(2) of Dublin III Regulation must be assessed against the length and conditions of detention and must be precisely evaluated with regard to the impact on a child. Failure to do so renders the decision to detain unlawful. 

When enforcing the Dublin III Regulation, the deporting country must verify whether the asylum procedure in the intermediary country sufficiently guarantees that the applicant will not be subject to a treatment which violates Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The deportation order was illegitimate due to inadequate conditions for the reception of asylum seekers and recognised refugees in Greece and the serious risk of inhuman or degrading treatment for asylum seekers and recognised refugees in Greece.

The Czech Regional Court dealt with an application concerning the unlawfulness of a decision taken under § 129 (1) of the Aliens Act. After engaging in textual and teleological analysis of the said national provision, the Court concluded that because the Member State failed to establish objective criteria for assessing the risk of absconding, the rule laid down in Article 28 of the Dublin III Regulation is not applicable in the Czech Republic.  

The Prague Regional court quashed a Dublin transfer decision in respect of a family of four Yazidi adults to Bulgaria. Firstly, the court held that the Ministry of Interior had paid insufficient consideration to whether the Bulgarian asylum system ensures adequate health care for one of the Applicants, suffering from a psychological disorder. Secondly, the court found that the Applicants were not subject to personal interviews in the proceedings concerning their Dublin transfer, thus violating their right to a fair trial. 

The procedural guarantee in Art. 4 of the Dublin Regulation (EU) No 604/2013 is mandatory. The guarantee concerns the asylum seekers right to information when they present an application for international protection.

This safeguard is not respected solely because the applicant has undergone a personal interview, he needs to be given the “Common Leaflet”. This aims at guaranteeing that the information has been delivered in a proper way and in a clear and objective manner.

Upon preliminary examination, it cannot be excluded that a decision of an administrative court, limited to making a Dublin transfer conditional upon the assurance of the competent authorities in the country of destination that accommodation will be provided for the family in question, violates the right to an effective remedy under Art. 19(4)(1) of the Basic Law.

Since the removal might lead to severe disadvantages for the applicants which cannot easily be compensated for and which outweigh the consequences of a preliminarily prolonged presence of the persons concerned, the removal has to be suspended until the Federal Constitutional Court has reached its final decision. 

An excessive length of the procedure (in this case 2 years and 5 months) for examining the jurisdiction for the application for international protection, which is not caused by the protection seeker himself, leads to an obligation of the Member State to decide the case itself (“duty of self-entry”). Thus this Member State has jurisdiction for the application for international protection to guarantee a fast and efficient procedure within the Dublin III-Regulation.

Detention pending Dublin transfer can only be ordered on the basis of Article 28 Dublin-III-Regulation, which contains autonomous provisions on the detention of foreigner. Additional criteria laid down by national laws are required in order to specify the condition of "risk of absconding". A deportation detention order that does not even refer to Art. 28 Dublin-III-Regulation is unlawful.

The court may reject the request for a preliminary ruling to the CJEU when the provision is clear (acte clair), only if it checks that the clarity of the contested provision is equally obvious to the courts of other Member States and the CJEU, taking into account the characteristics of EU law and special problems posed by its interpretation, including a comparison of all language versions, respecting the specific terminology of EU law and the placement of the interpretation in the context of EU law.

The Constitutional Court annulled the contested judgment because of the infringement of the right to equal protection of rights in connection to the right to an effective remedy.

The Applicant appealed a decision ordering his transfer to another Member State responsible for examining his application for international protection because the six-month period during which his transfer had to be carried out in accordance with Regulation (EU) no. 604/2013 known as “Dublin III” (the “Dublin III Regulation”) had expired. 

The Council of State denied the appeal holding that the six-month period was interrupted by the legal action against the transfer measure but had not restarted because the appeal was still pending when the Préfet issued the Dublin III summons to the Applicant.