European Asylum Support Office: An effective answer to Europeanization of Asylum Policy?

Abstract

Supranational agencies may solve problems of incomplete contracting.” The various parties to a contract pledge to behave in a certain way in the future in order to achieve a certain goal. However, all contracts are inevitably incomplete since they cannot spell out explicitly all the obligations of the parties throughout the life of the contract. Let us imagine that the contracting parties are the Union Member States and that the relevant obligation of the parties to the contract is the implementation of the Asylum Union acquis aimed at achieving the goal of a Common Asylum Support System. The agreement among the Member States fixes the general performance expectation (i.e. the implementation duties) but forgets to take into account a peculiar aspect of asylum law: its high dependency on the national administrative practices of dealing with applications for international protection. The contract among the Member States presents, thus, a gap that now has to be filled which is the convergence of administrative decision-making practices in granting asylum protection. The problem of incompleteness of the contract will be faced by a brand new supranational agency, as suggested by the contract paradigm of Pollack.