CONSENSUS IN THE COUNCIL OF THE EUROPEAN UNION: THE CASE OF THE FIRST-­‐COUNTRY RULE (original) (raw)

The existence of the Dublin Regulation may give the impression that Member States’ preferences in asylum policy have converged. However, developments of EU’s asylum policy since the early 1990s have shown two features of the Council's decision making process in this domain: (1) Member States have different preferences, but chose to compromise under the pressure of the consensus culture; and (2) Member States’ yield to consensus might not necessarily be free of self-interests, which may complicate the EU asylum policy harmonization process and trigger challenges in the implementation phase at the national level.