Are EU Member States Always Safe Countries of Origin?
Another threat to the full application of the Geneva Convention is the Protocol to the Amsterdam treaty, stating that member states should be regarded as safe countries of origin in respect of each other, thus limiting the right of asylum of EU nationals in the EU. This is the most notable failing of the Treaty in the area of asylum. It constitutes a geographical limitation to the implementation of the Geneva Convention,despite the fact that all member states are signatories of the 1967 Protocol. The worrying fact is that article 18 of the Charter of Fundamental rights adopted recently refers to the Amsterdam Treaty therefore to this Protocol as well. In the long term, as EU enlargement and political agreements move outwards, the consequences of an approach based on so called safe countries will be to squeeze the viable “asylum space” in the world continually down to size. There have been many references to such concepts recently especially in a proposition presented by Jack Straw, who
