The front cover art for Kafka' The Trial 1st edition, complete with dustjacket written by Franz Kafka. Wikicommons. Some right reserved.In Franz Kafka’s ‘The Trial’, Josef K. (an allegorical personification of the author) finds himself arrested, charged and on trial for a crime of which he knows nothing, without any defence. The undermining of presumed legal norms by the two “unidentified agents from an unspecified agency” and the “Committee of Affairs” leaves K. in the impossible position of a guilty man who does not know the nature of his crime.
Europe’s acrimonious setting aside of legal norms of due process has constructed a Kafka-esque reality for asylum law. Europe is incrementally separating itself from the Refugee Convention and is in turn, redefining its own parameters for establishing a humanitarian program that precludes a vast number of asylum applicants from requesting international protection.
First coming into force in between 1997 and 1998, the Dublin Convention established the criteria and mechanisms for determining which Member State bore the responsibility for examining an application for international protection under the Refugee Convention. In 2003, the Dublin Convention was replaced by the Dublin II Regulation, which was again amended in 2013 to create the Dublin III Regulation. I will not discuss the minutiae of the Dublin system’s history here.
