ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the EU Asylum Package aiming to highlight the progressive improvements and the deficiencies that still remain halfway through to the Stockholm goals because of some compromises made during the negotiations and because of the missed opportunities to clarify overly broad, complex and problematic provisions. To date, EU Member States have conceptualized the management of asylum and implemented EU asylum law in significantly different ways. In turn, this has led to a situation whereby there are huge disparities between Member States as regards the level and standard of protection, negatively impacting upon both asylum seekers and individual Member States. The recasting of key legislative EU instruments concerning the treatment, status and rights of those seeking international protection, as well as other initiatives concerning the external dimension of EU asylum policy such as the proposed EU resettlement scheme, aims to redress the gaps and weaknesses in the existing legislation.
