To ask Her Majesty's Government how many incoming transfers under the Dublin III Regulation (regulation 604/2013) were made to the UK in 2017; and how many times the discretion under Article 18(1) of the Regulation was used in 2017.
Answered on
16 January 2018
The discretionary clauses under the Dublin III Regulation can be found at Article 17 of the Regulation, with Article 17(2) being the relevant criteria for coming transfer requests
The Dublin III Regulation is a long-standing mechanism between EU Member States to determine responsibility for examining asylum claims. It is not an application route for transfer to the UK. At present we do not publish data on cases covered by the Dublin Regulation. Eurostat, the EU’s statistics agency, regularly publishes Member State figures, which can be found at:
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Asylum_quarterly_report.
The Commission has data up to, and including 2016. This shows the UK processed over 6,000 Dublin requests in 2016: over 4,200 outgoing requests to other Member States and almost 1,800 incoming requests. 2017 data is not yet available.
Under the Dublin III Regulation, Member States have two months from receiving a request from another participating Member State to accept or reject responsibility for processing the asylum claim.
Once a Dublin request has been accepted (or legal matters have been resolved), the Regulation provides that the sending Member State has six months to enact the transfer. The Home Office works closely with EU Member State partners to enact transfers as soon as possible and ahead of the six month timeframe.