Object of Risk or Subject of Protection? Procedural Design and Non-Refoulement in the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum : A Critical Analysis of the EU’s Screening Regulation and Asylum Procedure Regulation

Sammanfattning

The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum represents the most comprehensive restructuring of European asylum governance in decades. This thesis examines the procedural design of two of its legislative acts: the Screening Regulation (EU) 2024/1356 and the Asylum Procedure Regulation (EU) 2024/1348. Together, the two regulations establish a chain of procedures governing what happens to a person seeking asylum from the moment of irregular arrival at the EU’s external border until a final decision is made on their claim. Both regulations formally commit to the principle of non-refoulement and incorporate certain procedural safeguards, intended to preserve the rights of the people they govern. This thesis examines whether the regulations’ procedural design aligns with meaningful fulfillment of those commitments. Employing Bacchi’s “What’s the Problem Represented to Be?” method of policy analysis, informed by securitization theory, procedural justice theory, and Butler’s grievability framework, it is revealed that both regulations embed securitized rationalities that construct people seeking asylum as objects of risk management and structurally compromise the conditions necessary for reliable, meaningful assessment and harm recognition. By analyzing the regulations as a compounding chain of procedures, this thesis suggests that meaningful access to non-refoulement is structurally limited as a consequence of managing risk through efficient, categorical processing. The results ultimately indicate that the regulations’ procedural design can not reliably produce the conditions for comprehensive individual assessment that protection from refoulement requires.