Why Does No Common European List on Safe Country of Origin Exist Despite Numerous Efforts Aimed at the Harmonisation of European Asylum Policy?

The focal point of this paper is a specific element in the domain of asylum policies, the Safe Country of Origin (SCO) policy. This asylum policy became integrated into the European Union’s (EU) hard law in 2005 with the adoptation of Directive 2005/85/EC or Asylum Procedures Directive (APD). The SCO policy envisions a list of countries considered ‘safe’ and allows for asylum applications from those countries to be rendered ‘unfounded’. The SCO list materialised as an effort to devise a more expeditious asylum procedure by fast-tracking the process for a distinctive group of claimants. Until the present day, reaching consensus on the definition of ‘safe’ and the content of a common EU SCO list has proven impossible. The purpose of this paper is to theorise and explain the absence of a pan-EU SCO list. As a dominant theory of regional integration (Hoffmann 1966, 1995; Milward 2000), Liberal intergovernmentalism (LI) will provide a complementary analytical framework offering insight into the process of making a supranational SCO list in order to underline the interactions between both Member States (MS) and the EU. This investigation will also discern a constellation of factors responsible for the current impasse. The paper argues that no consensus on a common EU SCO list was reached as MS arrived at the negotiation table with dissimilar migratory pressures, combined with the heterogenous procedural application of SCO in their respective national legislatures. What motivated states to push for negotiations on this policy was a desire to attract support for a restrictive and deterring asylum tool by incorporating it into EU hard law, allowing for almost immediate rejection of applicants from ‘safe’ countries and therefore reducing the pressure on asylum determination systems.