Abstract
This chapter presents a critical analysis of the traditional understanding of the ‘asylum seeker’ in international law and compares this with the definition in European Union (EU) asylum legislation, applicable before 2013, when the same definition of ‘asylum seeker’ was removed from the applicable legal instruments and only the term, ‘applicant’, was maintained. Essentially, it argues that the right of asylum seekers to receive asylum and the corresponding duty of EU states to grant asylum, created as a result of the development of a Common European Asylum System, have led to a different understanding of the ‘asylum seeker’ to that found in international law, namely as a distinct legal category, conditioned by the rights and duties imposed by EU law and the policies of the EU state of asylum. The chapter also briefly discusses some of the problems which the introduction of this ad hoc informal status has led to, under the previous EU reception regime.
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- 1.
Nonetheless, the ongoing case of Russian whistleblower, Maria Efimova, currently wanted by the Maltese courts to face fraud allegations, has challenged both the long held perception of EU countries as “safe” COO and the narrow definition of asylum seeker under EU asylum law—see Caruana (2018).
- 2.
See, for example, European Court of Human Rights, Suso Musa v Malta, App. No. 42337/12, 9 December 2013.
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Dalli, J. (2019). Asylum Seeker. In: Bartolini, A., Cippitani, R., Colcelli, V. (eds) Dictionary of Statuses within EU Law. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00554-2_6
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