In All Fairness: Dublin Transfers and the Redistribution of Asylum Responsibility

Solidarity and fairness in the allocation of responsibilities for refugee protection has emerged as a central challenge in European asylum governance. The Dublin Regulation, which assigns responsibility for asylum claims primarily to the first country of entry, has long been criticized for generating unequal burdens and undermining solidarity within the EU. While political and academic debates have increasingly invoked fairness as a guiding principle, empirical assessments of how responsibility is actually distributed under the Dublin system remain limited. This article advances a new perspective by conceptualizing fairness in terms of equitable responsibility-sharing and analysing the total of Dublin statistics from 2008 to 2024. Using a distribution key based on a member state’s size and wealth as a normative benchmark, we analyse the extent to which the Dublin mechanism reduces or exacerbates asymmetries between member states. Contrary to common perceptions, we find that Dublin transfers modestly reduce—rather than reinforce—the imbalanced distribution of asylum responsibilities, as a result of the geographic patterns of refugee arrivals paired with the partial implementation of the Dublin rules. These findings challenge prevailing critiques of the system and offer important insights for evaluating the fairness and future viability of the EU’s reformed solidarity mechanism.