3.2.5.3. Access to and quality of reception conditions in the country responsible for an application

Italy notified other Member States in December 2022 that it would not accept incoming transfers due to a lack of reception places.342 Jurisprudence from several EU+ countries reflected this change.343 Nonetheless, in the Netherlands, lower courts still came to divergent conclusions for confirming or not transfers to Italy at the beginning of 2023.344 The Council of State found that the Dutch authorities could not rely on the interstate principle of mutual trust in April 2023. The council rejected the argument that Italian authorities indicated merely a pressure on the reception system and not a complete lack of places, and that the impediment to the implementation of the transfer should be regarded as temporary. It concluded that the applicant put forward objective information providing the basis to assert that there were systemic errors in reception in Italy. The court underlined that this did not mean that Italian authorities were indifferent to the situation of the applicant. However, there was a real risk, that applicants would find themselves in material deprivation, preventing them from meeting their most important basic needs upon a transfer.345  

Jurisprudence remained divergent in Germany. Courts allowed appeals in several cases against transfers to Italy.346 However, the German Federal Administrative Court ruled that the lack of willingness of Italy to take back an applicant did not automatically mean that there were systemic deficiencies in the country’s reception system.347 The Regional Administrative Court of Würzburg ruled that healthy, employable applicants should be able to support themselves through legal work and meet their basic needs.348  

The Portuguese Supreme Administrative Court also confirmed a transfer of an applicant with health issues, noting that deficiencies in the provision of health care and unsatisfactory access to accommodation still did not meet the high threshold of systemic flaws. 

During 2023, the situation in Italy resulted in an increasing number of cases where the responsibility shifted to the requesting EU+ country and this added to the high pressure on many countries’ asylum and reception systems. Against this background, for example, German authorities needed to inform their Italian counterpart of the postponement of the next interview mission under the Voluntary Solidarity Mechanism, established in 2022 and coordinated by the European Commission.349  

The regional court in the Netherlands cancelled a transfer decision for a single mother with a baby to France due to risk of homelessness.350 The transfer of a mother with her child to Bulgaria from Austria was cancelled as the Constitutional Court found that the lower court failed to sufficiently investigate the reception situation in Bulgaria, specifically for vulnerable applicants.

The lack of reception places in Belgium also led to the annulment of transfers, for example from Denmark351 and the Netherlands.352 However, in March 2024, the Dutch Council of State concluded that shortcomings in the Belgian reception system did not mean that the principle of inter-state mutual trust cannot be relied upon for the country. Italian courts annulled transfers to Malta,353 Romania354 and Slovenia,355 finding that reception conditions would have been inadequate for the specific applicants if returned in the Dublin procedure.