- Area of freedom, security and justice forms an area of activity of the European Union and was established in 1997 by the Amsterdam Treaty – its provisions regulate inter alia asylum and migration law and policy.
- It must be noted that in 1985 European countries decided to establish so called Schengen Area allowing for free movement of passengers through the area without internal borders.
For consecutive years more legal instruments have been adopted, but what is interesting, they were not forming the EU legal system.
- The whole acquis Schengen was implemented into the Union Law by Amsterdam Treaty provisions – in practice in 1999 when the treaty provisions came into force.
- What is interesting, membership in the EU does not automatically means membership in the Schengen zone. A candidate state must fulfill some conditions prescribed by law to join the group. The best example is Poland becoming the EU Member in 2004 and consecutively the Schengen area in 2007.
- EU migration law and policy is being created by secondary legislative acts: regulations and directives. It is worth mentioning that regulations don’t have to be transposed into national legal system –as a rule they are in force from the moment of publication in the Official Journal of the EU. They cannot be found in the Polish Journal of Laws but they are enforced directly by Polish authorities and administrative bodies – the good example is the Schengen Border Code.
- By contrast, directives need to be implemented into a national legal system – usually in form of a statute adopted by national Parliament. For example asylum package (directives regulating Common European Asylum System) were transposed by statute’s
- Currently, due to Migration Crisis that the Union has been facing, the basis for European migration policy is so called European Agenda on Migration – document adopted by the European Commission on 13th May 2015. In recent years multiannual programmes were adopted by the European Council (Tampere, Hague and Stokholm Programme)
- It must be also added that administrative bodies in the area of asylum and migration are also so called European Migration Agencies – EASO located on Malta and European Cost and Border Guards with its headquarters in Warsaw.
Interesting info can be also found here