Burden Sharing in the Field of Asylum : Legal Motivations and Implications of a Regional Approach

This paper aims at explaining and evaluation the current development of burden sharing schemes among EU member states in the field of asylum. It purports to assess the motivations and detect the potential effects and consequences of the European burden sharing project. To achieve this objective, the paper confronts the potentialities and virtues of burden sharing development with recently enacted legal norms at the EU level (mainly the July 2001 Temporary Protection Directive and the October 2000 European Refugee Fund Regulation but also other norms regulating immigration and impacting on asylum)