Access to Asylum in the EU - Externalizing Borders and Shifting Responsibility

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this thesis is to research the access to asylum within the EU and how this is regulated in the EU legal system. At the center are the European Courts and their interpretation of the law concerning access to asylum. The thesis examines various stages in which refugees may access asylum and how this increasingly made more difficult by the EU and its Member States. For this reason, the research question is as follows: How is the access to asylum regulated by EU law and how is it ensured to be followed in practice by Member States and interpreted by the European Courts? In order to answer this question, the material researched has primarily been EU law such as directives and regulations, as well as case law from the CJEU and ECtHR. There is also secondary sources such as literature from researchers and scholars. The conclusions reached are that the EU continuously externalizes its own borders and shifting responsibility to both its own Member States, where Mediterranean States are taking the heaviest burden, but also to third countries through special agreements and arrangements. This trend has become more significant in the years following the 2015 so-called refugee crisis, as now the judiciaries are ruling more restrictively in migration cases than before. This has resulted in systematically eliminating the few legal ways for people to access asylum, such as visas, and leaving them no choice but to attempt the dangerous crossings of deserts and seas to enter Europe irregularly.