Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the average length of time for a transfer under the Dublin III regulation procedure is from when a Member State accepts responsibility to the transfer from the UK to that Member State.

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 At present we do not publish data on cases covered by the Dublin Regulation.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://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=migr_dubto&lang=en

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, 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.

The latest guidance on the Dublin III Regulation was published in April 2020 and can be found via the link below:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/797216/Dublin-III-regulation-v2.0ext.pdf

The UK is committed to providing protection to those who need it, in accordance with its international obligations. It is an established principle that those in need of protection should seek asylum in the first safe country that they enter and not put their lives at risk by making unnecessary and dangerous onwards journeys to the UK. Illegal migration from safe countries undermines our efforts to help those most in need.

Controlled resettlement via safe and legal routes is the best way to protect refugees and disrupt the organised crime groups that exploit migrants and refugees. We support these principles by:

• treating asylum claims made in the UK as inadmissible if the claimants have suitable protection in another safe country from where they would not face refoulement (that is, the country would not force the claimant to return to another country where they would be at risk of harm or persecution)
• treating asylum claims made in the UK as inadmissible if the claimant has travelled through or has a connection to another safe country which is not their own, on the basis that the claimant has, or could have lodged their asylum claim there
• progressing to removal stage those who undertake illegal journeys and subvert immigration control, to demonstrate that such action will not lead to entry to, or settlement in the UK.

Information regarding how many inadmissible decisions based on the concept of safe third country, first country of asylum and which designated safe third country those decisions relate to is not recorded or held in a reportable format.

Full guidance on which asylum claims must be treated as inadmissible was published in October 2019 and can be found via the link below:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/inadmissibility-third-country-cases