The “dublin system” is a collection of european regulations that aims to determine which state is responsible for examining an asylum application. The system has evolved against the background of a european area without internal frontiers that has progressively developed since the schengen agreement of 1985. The original dublin convention was signed in june 1990 in conjunction with the schengen implementation convention (see hailbronner & thiery 1997). The reasoning behind the dublin convention was that without compensatory measures, such as rules about responsibility for asylum applications, states would not have ceded the competence to control their own borders.