The Policy and Guidance

Abstract

The contours of international protection in EU member states are mainly determined by three elements: the 1951 Refugee Convention and the EU Common European Asylum System (CEAS), alongside international human rights law, including the 1950 ECHR (Chap. 3 ). While Germany and Italy are bound by the CEAS recast instruments, the UK has remained only bound by the 2003 Reception Directive, 2004 Qualification Directive and 2005 Procedures Directive. Yet, this and other type of legislative options do not, in themselves, necessarily produce considerable variations across the EU (Querton 2019), as many other factors contribute to different degrees of policy variation between EU member states. Amongst these factors, it is worth considering in particular geographical location, political context and internal governance structure, further contextualised by the statistics available.