# Screening for Asylum at Airports: The Implementation of the ‘Manifestly Unfounded’ Filter in France and Germany, 1980–2005

Fabrice Langrognet

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Fabrice Langrognet. Screening for Asylum at Airports: The Implementation of the ‘Manifestly Unfounded’ Filter in France and Germany, 1980–2005. Social Policy and Administration, 2024, Dynamics of Migration Policy, 59 (4), pp.608-617. 10.1111/spol.13101. halshs-05497684

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ORIGINAL ARTICLE

OPEN ACCESS

# Screening for Asylum at Airports: The Implementation of the ‘Manifestly Unfounded’ Filter in France and Germany, 1980–2005

Fabrice Langrognet

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

Researcher in Modern History at CNRS, France

**Correspondence:** Fabrice Langrognet (fabrice.langrognet@univ-paris1.fr)

**Received:** 29 April 2024 | **Revised:** 14 October 2024 | **Accepted:** 19 October 2024

**Funding:** This work was supported by Leverhulme Trust, ECF-2020-594.

**Keywords:** airports | asylum | borders

## ABSTRACT

This historical paper examines pre-screening procedures for asylum-seekers at Western European international airports during the period from the 1980s to the 2000s, with a particular focus on France and Germany as case studies. It highlights the tension between attempts to standardise the application of the ‘manifest unfoundedness’ criterion for asylum claims at the border through intergovernmental harmonisation efforts and the significant variations observed in how this criterion was implemented both between and within Member States of the European Community and later the European Union. By exploring these discrepancies, the paper emphasises the context-dependent nature of enforcing asylum rules and the influence of local dynamics on the effectiveness of these norms. It begins by providing background on the refugee landscape in the 1980s and the prevalent desire among Western European policy-makers to reduce the number of asylum-seekers at the borders. The paper then discusses efforts to harmonise procedures and the adoption of a common, and soon distorted, yardstick pertaining to the ‘manifest unfoundedness’ of asylum claims. Furthermore, the article examines disparities in implementation across countries and within them, shedding light on differences in norms, procedures and institutional dynamics that led to divergent approaches at the local level.

## 1 | Introduction

Article 33 (1) of the 1951 Geneva Convention relating to the status of refugees provides that:

> No Contracting State shall expel or return ("refouler") a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.

The foundational principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits the return of individuals to a country where they may face persecution, predates even the Geneva Convention and is considered as old as the concept of legal asylum itself. According to the UNHCR, this principle applies universally, extending beyond the signatories of the Convention (UNHCR 2001a). Despite numerous affirmations of commitment to this principle in various legal instruments concerning refugees, many of these same instruments have made it increasingly difficult for asylum-seekers to enter foreign territory, access asylum procedures and attain refugee status.

<footnote>This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.</footnote>
By the early 1990s, French socialists had designated ‘the de-
crease of the number of asylum claims’ as the central goal of
their refugee policy. Similarly, the German conservative chan-
cellor cautioned against the surge in asylum seekers surpassing
‘the threshold of our capacity’.¹ Throughout the 1980s, Western
European countries extended and reinforced mandatory visas
and carrier sanctions explicitly to deter extracommunitarian
foreigners from seeking refugee status (Czaika, De Haas, and
Villares-Varel 2018).

A political consensus emerged around the notion that
the international asylum regime had reached its limits
(Loescher 1994). As a consequence of the curtailment of la-
bour immigration orchestrated by most Western nations in
the 1970s, family reunification and political asylum emerged
as the primary avenues for prospective migrants. Despite sig-
nificant political and humanitarian crises triggering massive
population displacements, European policymakers became
convinced that the majority of asylum-seekers were opportun-
ists intent on exploiting the international protection system,
a perception that had been gaining traction since the 1960s
(Poutrus 2014). Between 1953 and 1978, West Germany regis-
tered an average of 7,100 asylum-seekers annually. However,
in the context of the Iranian revolution (1979), the military
coup in Turkey (1980), and the imposition of martial law in
Poland (1980–1981), the Federal Republic received 200,000
asylum applications between 1979 and 1981.² After a brief de-
cline in the early 1980s, applications surged again in Germany
to over 250,000 in 1991 and 438,000 in 1992, following the
Balkan War outbreak (UNHCR 2001b). As application num-
bers increased, the rate of refugee status recognition plum-
meted. The recognition rate, which had consistently exceeded
80% in Germany before 1980, fell to 29% in 1985 and fluctu-
ated between 3% and 7% in the early 1990s. These figures do
not even account for many East Germans, who were not clas-
sified as asylum-seekers as they were automatically eligible
for West German citizenship. In France, the number of indi-
viduals seeking international protection soared from 20,000
applications per year in the early 1980s to 61,000 in 1989.³ Not
all recipient states experienced the phenomenon with equal
intensity, and application growth was not linear. However, re-
forming the system was deemed urgent, particularly given its
perceived role in exacerbating civil society’s burgeoning xeno-
phobic sentiments.

Moreover, refugees in the 1980s became depoliticized and less
geopolitically attractive. The resettlement of hundreds of thou-
sands of ‘boat-people’ from Southeast Asia, which continued
throughout the 1980s, was viewed by Western countries as a one-
time effort not to be replicated. As East–West tensions subsided
in the mid-1980s, the ideological imperative to demonstrate that
Southeast Asians and Eastern Europeans were fleeing commu-
nism to resettle in the Free World gradually lost its significance.

Simultaneously, air travel witnessed a boom and became more
accessible. While this was advantageous for individuals seeking
to escape difficult circumstances, it also meant that those arriv-
ing at air borders hailed from much farther away. Some scholars
argue that a fundamental novelty of the 1980s was the increas-
ing presence of Black and Brown asylum seekers who arrived of
their own volition, without prior invitation by Western states,

factors contributing to heightened unease among recipient
countries (Joppke 1997, 112; Akoka 2020). According to Barnett,
‘alleged differences in race and culture have made refugees a
source of suspicion and hostility since the developing world
became the source of significant refugee flows to the West in
the 1970s’ (Barnett 2002, 254). Indeed, by the 1980s, racialized
portrayals of refugees from the Global South had supplanted the
image of the European refugee in the public imagination.

In Europe, the growing imperative to fortify external borders was further fuelled by the scheduled relaxation of intra-European movement. Building upon the Benelux experiment initiated in 1960, France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Luxembourg agreed in Schengen in 1985 to strive for a unified area without internal border controls. The new framework, which eventually took effect 10 years later with 10 participating countries, stipulated that individuals permitted entry into one participant state could subsequently travel freely to others, thus incentivising the harmonisation of asylum and migration policies. Consequently, European states convened in various forums to devise collective strategies for managing asylum-seekers at borders while endeavouring to comply with the *non-refoulement* principle.

They had already signalled their intentions to the UNHCR. As recently as 1977, the UN refugee agency had unequivocally stated that asylum-seekers should be shielded from expulsion to their country of origin before the determination process concluded.⁴ However, in 1983, the Executive Committee of the UNHCR, comprising representatives of state parties, exerted pressure on the organisation. It acknowledged that applications for refugee status from individuals clearly lacking valid claims under the criteria set by the 1951 Geneva Convention posed ‘a serious problem’ in several states.⁵ ‘Such applications are burdensome to the affected countries and detrimental to the interests of those applicants who have good grounds for requesting recognition as refugees’.⁶ Consequently, national authorities were authorised to expedite the processing of such applications ‘considered to be so obviously without foundation as not to merit full examination at every level of the procedure’.⁷ Such applications were to be defined, however, as those ‘clearly fraudulent or not related to the criteria for the granting of refugee status laid down in the 1951 United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees nor to any other criteria justifying the granting of asylum’.⁸

Another important development was happening at that time in
the European Community member states. Interior ministries,
traditionally in charge of border control, progressively bypassed
the foreign ministries, which had long been tasked with asy-
lum and refugee policy. In late 1985, the Intergovernmental
Consultations on Migration, Asylum and Refugees (IGC)
were put in place by interior ministries' bureaucracies to dis-
cuss border policies, and specifically refugee-policy tightening
measures, in secrecy. In 1986, the British Presidency of the
European Community brought to life an intergovernmental 'Ad
Hoc Immigration Group', formed of the ministers in charge of
immigration in the 12 EC Member States, but outside the EC
institutions (Lyons 1999, 263–268). At a meeting of the group
in 1991 in The Hague, the 12 ministers deemed it necessary
and urgent to come up with harmonised procedures in order to
make quick distinctions between well-founded asylum claims
and those that 'manifestly were not'. The group accordingly
prepared a commonly agreed framework about 'manifestly un-
founded applications for asylum'. This document was adopted
as a non-binding resolution on 30 November 1992 in London. It
eloquently revealed the political consensus of the time:

... a rising number of applicants for asylum in the Member States are not in genuine need of protection within the Member States within the terms of the Geneva Convention, and [we are] concerned that such manifestly unfounded applications overload asylum determination procedures, delay the recognition of refugees in genuine need of protection and jeopardize the integrity of the institution of asylum.⁹

It then listed a number of conditions that characterised a mani-
festly unfounded application, essentially grouped in two major,
alternative categories: there is ‘clearly no substance to the ap-
plicant’s claim to fear persecution in his own country’, or the
claim is ‘based on deliberate deception or is an abuse of asy-
lum procedures’.¹⁰ Although the London resolution was never
turned into a binding instrument—as the German and Danish
delegations had wished for—, the definitions of ‘manifest un-
foundedness’ that were then enacted in European legal systems
closely followed the common framework. The notion became a
cornerstone of both airport asylum procedures and fast-track
processing of asylum claims filed inside the Member States’ ter-
ritories. As a result, positive refugee law was amended in very
similar terms in European States between 1992 and 1995, with
States emulating both the London guidelines and each oth-
er’s reforms. The introduction of an airport asylum procedure
in Germany in 1993 took clear inspiration, for instance, from
what France, the Netherlands and Denmark had done before
(Fullerton 2001). As French authorities acknowledged, the
gradual understanding of the ‘manifestly-unfounded’ notion
was inspired by the ‘reflections started at the UNHCR Executive
Committee as well as within the context of the efforts, by the
EC Member States, towards the harmonization of their asylum
policies’.¹¹ As late as the mid-2000s, the French asylum agency
would refer to the 1992 resolution as its main guideline for the
assessment of an application’s manifest unfoundedness.¹²

3 | Normative and Procedural Differences in Implementation of the ‘Manifestly Unfounded’ Filter

And yet at the borders, despite a common language, differences
remained. Procedural guarantees varied: the right to an inter-
preter, the duration of the pre-screening interview, the right to
a judicial review, the access of NGOs to the asylum-seekers, the
availability of legal counsel all differed from one country to the
next. As for administrative interpretations, they could be fa-
vourable to claimants. In France, a 1982 decree provided that
‘when a foreign national arrives at the border and asks to be
granted asylum, the decision to deny entry into France can only
be taken by the Minister of the Interior, after consultation with
the Minister of Foreign Affairs’.¹³ In this context, French asy-
lum officials whose role it was to issue the non-binding opinion

on behalf of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, came up in 1991
with a theory that they viewed as a corollary of the screening for
manifest unfoundedness: the claimant should get the ‘benefit of
the doubt’.¹⁴ Inspired from criminal law, such approach had no
direct equivalent in neighbouring countries’ airport procedures,
and explicitly persisted until the late 1990s. In the early months
of application of that standard, more than 50% of applications
were not deemed manifestly unfounded, which did not mean
that they were eventually successful—a large proportion of peo-
ple allowed into France on this basis and file for asylum had
their application denied by the French Asylum Office (OFPRA)
and its appellate body (CRR).¹⁵

Governments' interventions in favour or against certain cohorts of asylum-seekers could lead to clear differences in treatment. In June 1989, after the Tiananmen massacre, some Western countries decided to organise the asylum of hundreds of Chinese student leaders (Lim 2014, 70–71). As they landed at Paris airports, those asylum-seekers were quietly exfiltrated by the border police in an operation pre-arranged by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and they were given refugee status without examination—they did not even go through the airport terminals, bypassing the ‘manifestly founded’ filter altogether.¹⁶

More importantly, the format and content of the pre-screening
interviews varied considerably between countries. They all
started from similar baselines related to the motives of the al-
leged flight, and the nature of the persecutions. The interviews
usually devolved, however, into attempts to trap claimants in re-
vealing their bad faith. This is when questions, unmoored from
the core requirements of the procedure, followed much hap-
hazard tracks. Not only could their degree of specificity vary,
but their thematical scope could be wide-ranging as well. In
Germany, asylum officials were keen to ask interviewees about
the price of petrol, the structure of education in their commu-
nity, the bank interest rates or the tax systems (Laier 1994, 29).
In France, geography and national political events were the pre-
ferred lines of questioning.¹⁷ The creativity of interviewers knew
few boundaries to prove that people were not really from where
they claimed to come from. This could lead to ask absurd ques-
tions such as the name of a Liberian ping-pong champion (De
Stoop 1996, 132). In another case, an asylum-seeker was asked
‘to describe his alleged prison cell [in his country of origin] and
to specify its floor area. Stressed out, the claimant replied 4
square meters. At the end of the interview, [the asylum official]
said “You see, he is completely making things up. There are no
4-square-meter prison cells!”¹⁸

Unsurprisingly, in this context, rates of admissions at the border
differed significantly from one country to the next, with no con-
sistency over time. Some states displayed such a restrictive ap-
proach to the manifestly unfounded criterion, that by the end of
the 1990s, the UNHCR expressed bitter regrets. It deplored that
‘the notions of manifestly unfounded and abusive applications
have, in the practice of certain States, been gradually extended
beyond the original meaning of these terms’.¹⁹ In France, the ad-
mission rate of asylum-seekers at the French border went down
from 40% in 2001% to 20% in 2002 and 3.8% in 2003, before os-
cillating between 10% and 30% in the ensuing decade, while the
numbers of applications at airport went down significantly in
absolute terms.²⁰ Initially, the idea that had been agreed upon
by the UNHCR as well as Constitutional courts was that a man-
ifestly unfounded request was a claim filed by an applicant who
had obviously, and without any advanced examination, no valid
ground for protection under the Geneva Convention. In the own
words of a French minister of the Interior, this meant a request
that could be ‘dismissed without having any specific knowledge
[about geopolitics], for instance when the foreigner states he or
she came to France to work’.²¹ The French constitutional court
concurred: the unfoundedness could be regarded as manifest
when ‘no research [was] needed’.²²

In practice, however, national authorities promoted a much
wider understanding of the notion and therefore a deeper
screening of people's narratives, in line with their shared politi-
cal objective, keeping asylum-seekers at bay.²³ In the words of a
French human rights watchdog:

in practice, this procedure [...] goes far beyond
assessing whether the application is 'manifestly
unfounded'. It involves an extensive pre-examination
of the merits of the application, carried out under
conditions that do not respect the minimum
procedural guarantees attached to the normal
procedure for examining an asylum application. This
procedure entails a serious risk of error of assessment,
given the short deadlines and the conditions under
which it is carried out. For example, it can happen
that a foreigner whose application has been declared
"manifestly unfounded" at the border is subsequently
recognised as a refugee in France by OFPRA or
the CRR [the appellate court reviewing OFPRA's
decisions]. (CNCDH 2006, 34)

(CNCDH 2006, 34). This last scenario was exemplified by the
case of an Eritrean journalist, which led to France's condem-
nation in 2007 by the European Court of Human Rights for not
offering a remedy with automatic suspensive effect against an
order denying entry at an airport to an asylum seeker whose ap-
plication is denied as manifestly unfounded.²⁴

4 | Institutional Dynamics Affecting the Implementation of Asylum Pre-Screening at Air Borders

Inter-institutional relations could also foster divergences in im-
plementations, notably between the police and asylum officials.
In France as in Germany, the border force had been used to fil-
tering requests for asylum (pré-tri, Vorsortierung). In Germany,
as early as 1977, an internal instruction allowed border offi-
cials to conduct a preliminary evaluation of asylum applica-
tions. They could assess an applicant's chances of success and,
if those were deemed too low, could deny entry on this ground
(Spaich 1982). Although repealed on paper in 1981, this mecha-
nism remained in place in practice, and empowered the border
force to perform discretionary sorting, at the border, between
real and fake asylum-seekers, even before the Federal Asylum
Office could assess the case (Poutrus 1996, 889–890). In the
same vein, the German border guards at Frankfurt airport were

routinely instructed to dismiss as manifestly unfounded, with-
out pre-screening, all requests made by people coming from so-
called 'safe countries of origin' or from 'safe third countries'. In
1995, for instance, it was decided that Nigerian nationals could
be turned back to Nigeria with no further ado.²⁵ This practice of
denying certain individuals of the mere possibility of filing asym-
lum based on their citizenship or of their country of departure,
which preceded and inspired the Dublin convention regime,
was eventually greenlit by the German constitutional court in
1996.²⁶

These exceptions were not inconsistent with the London guide-
lines. Those permitted that 'an application for asylum may not
be subject to determination by a Member State of refugee sta-
tus' when the asylum applicant 'has had an opportunity, at the
border or within the territory' of a host third country, 'to make
contact with that country's authorities in order to seek their
protection'. They also allowed member States to draw up lists
of countries 'in which there is in general terms no serious risk
of persecution'. In the absence of any specific indications pre-
sented by the applicant, which might outweigh such a general
presumption, the application could be considered as manifestly
unfounded.²⁷ When it came to asylum at borders, however, no
comparable automatic rejection prevailed in France, until the
Dublin convention came into force in 1997.

But in France as well, border guards would routinely refuse
to register asylum requests and trigger the pre-screening pro-
cedure. In the late 1980s, at Paris Charles-de-Gaulle airport, a
frontline officer would determine whether the request was 'se-
rious enough'. If so, he would contact a colleague of his, from
the 'information unit', in charge of the pre-assessment itself.
Then, if it warranted further examination, he would contact
the border force headquarters in Paris, which would actually
kickstart the asylum screening per se by formally asking the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs for its opinion on the case, which in
turn would defer to the asylum office.²⁸ A similar multi-stage
filter prevailed in Germany, where the airport police hierarchy
had to agree to formally open the 'airport procedure' of asylum
(Flughafenverfahren), which had been formalised by a 1982
law.²⁹ At Frankfurt airport's detention facility, in 1991, unad-
mitted passengers were held separately from asylum-seekers
whose request had been registered, lest they learned the magical
words 'persecution' or 'asylum' and filed their own requests.³⁰
In 1994, an instruction of the German Border Force provided
that all aspiring refugees who would be unable to pronounce the
German word Asyl 'without accent' would be sent back.³¹

When an asylum form was indeed compiled by the police upon
request from the foreigner, it was then routinely used by asy-
lum officials, during the pre-screening interview itself, to point
at variations in the claimants' narratives and aggressively chal-
lenge their trustworthiness. Here is an excerpt from a transcript
of the pre-screening interview of a Congolese asylum-seeker at
Frankfurt airport in 1997:

Question: When were you raped?

Answer: That was in August 1996 when I was in the forest.
Question: Are you sure that was in August 1996?

Answer: Yes.

Question: How is it that when you were questioned by the Bundesgrenzschutz [the border police] you stated that you were raped in June 1996, while you now claim that it was in August?

Answer: That can't be, I just said that I had left in June... and ran into the forest.³²

When asylum officials started to be present at the airport, their coexistence with the police proved tense. Some of the first asylum agents dispatched to Charles-de-Gaulle airport in 1991–1992 remember that police officers were constantly at their side as they were conducting the pre-screening interviews, which initially took place in the asylum-seekers' bedrooms, in the hotel that doubled as a detention facility.³³ The union representatives at the French Asylum Office were unsurprisingly vocal against this new procedure and the conditions in which agents were asked to fulfil their mission.³⁴

Divergences could also exist, in France, between asylum officials and members of the refugee division at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The latter was technically the authority, according to the 1982 decree, which was responsible for providing the opinion on the admissibility. The custom, however, had been that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would systematically follow the recommendations of the Asylum Office, and that in turn the Ministry of the Interior would follow the opinion of the Foreign Affairs. When an official at the refugee division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs started to regularly overrule the Asylum Office's recommendations of admission, tensions brewed between the two bureaucracies.³⁵

In both France and Germany, the executive branch's deep distrust of the court system, viewed as too lenient towards immigrants, led to additional procedural hurdles. In the German airport procedure instituted in 1993, the time limit for filing a suspensive application to the administrative court for temporary injunction was 3 days. If that deadline was not met or the request denied, deportation could take place before the court had made a final decision on the merit of the 'manifestly unfounded' determination (Krais and Tausch 1995, 322–329; Bosswick 2000, 51). On the other hand, when presented with an injunction request in time, it was not infrequent for German administrative courts to let people in on humanitarian ground, while acknowledging that their asylum request was, indeed, manifestly unfounded (Laier 1999, 113).

In France, the law was designed in such a way that the intervention of the ordinary courts (*juge judiciaire*)—whose historical role was to safeguard individual freedoms—was only required when people needed to be held at the border for more than 4 days. The government's rationale was that the procedure could be completed before reaching the 4-day mark and people sent back on the next flight, thereby evading the control of supposedly lenient and fussy judges.³⁶ Initially, the government had tried to do away with judicial review altogether, but this was not allowed

by France's Constitutional court.³⁷ It is true that an emergency appeal could always be lodged, within 48 h, before the administrative judge. But until 2007 and the aforementioned condemnation of France by the European Court of Human Rights, such an appeal was not suspensive and, therefore, entirely toothless.

Other factors could also be driving variations in the implementation of the filtering mechanism. For one thing, ideology and stereotypes seem to play a significant role. In the 1980s, asylum fraud and abuse became associated with certain origins. In France, Zairans and Angolans became the main targets of that systematic second-guessing in the mid-1980s, by asylum officials and police alike. One former police officer from Paris Charles-de-Gaulle claimed that almost no one was a real refugee—but Africans were ‘so bad at lying’, as opposed to the Chinese, who he and his colleagues lauded as ‘cunning’, thus mobilising a variety of longstanding racial tropes.³⁸ This particular focus on certain cohorts of foreigners translated into differentiated levels of controls at borders according to nationalities, which at airports effectively meant according to flights and airlines.

The endemic corruption of some members of the border police was also something that altered the enforcement of the norms. As one French police officer remembered, in the late 1980s some of his colleagues would pretend not to hear the word 'asylum' uttered by people pushed back at the border, unless they smoothened things out with a 'friendly gesture'.³⁹ Then came the contingency of legal aid, which asylum-seekers were slowly granted access to in the 1990s, but which often came too late in the process. Those who could contact family members inside the country of destination and whose relatives were able to activate legal aid and NGOs seem to have been more successful in being granted admission into the territory, or at least have their asylum request registered—although this was by no means a certainty. But for this, access to a payphone at the airport was necessary, and this privilege was often denied to asylum-seekers in the 1980s, and later parsimoniously granted.⁴⁰

Interpreters also performed a key role in the airport asylum procedure. Until the early 1990s, in France, Belgium and Germany, the translation was performed by non-professionals: asylum-seekers, airline personnel or airport staff who happened to be bilingual.⁴¹ Professional interpreters started being called in the 1990s, but the authorities were conscious that they could distort some of the claimants' narratives.⁴² And just as law enforcement members and asylum officials, they could display significant biases against asylum-seekers and tamper with the assessment (Maréchal 2022). Here is what one direct witness heard from an interpreter at Charles-de-Gaulle addressing the asylum official during an asylum interview: 'You see, she hesitates... her story doesn't hold up... She also gets lost in a lot of useless anecdotes'. That same person also conveniently forgot to translate the threats mentioned by the claimant (Tristan 1993, 152–154). This echoes the insights of socio-linguistic studies, which have shown that translators often wield a central, if ambivalent, influence in bureaucratic interactions. Recent inquiries into their intermediary status and practices have stressed the ambiguous nature of their participation in asylum policies (Mellinger 2022; Maréchal 2024; Amato and Gallai 2024).
This study has elucidated how Western European nations, exemplified by France and Germany, forged an exception to a cornerstone of international law, the *non-refoulement* principle, enabling the rejection of asylum-seekers at their borders. Faced in the 1980s and 1990s with what they perceived as an overwhelming influx of refugees, these states sought pragmatic avenues to address the perceived crisis by bending legal asylum principles without explicitly renouncing them. Initially operating outside formal regulation and judicial oversight, one of the main exceptions allowed for the denial of entry to individuals whose asylum claims at the border were deemed 'manifestly unfounded', particularly evident in airport settings. However, Western European countries swiftly exploited and distorted this pre-screening mechanism, exposing asylum-seekers to significant risks within a procedure lacking the safeguards of conventional refugee-status determination.

This paper has underscored the evolution from initially targeting clearly fraudulent or non-conforming applications to broader criteria encompassing contradictions, inconsistencies or insufficient detail in asylum requests. Despite efforts at inter-governmental harmonisation, significant disparities persisted in the implementation of the 'manifest unfoundedness' standard, reflecting diverse administrative and judicial structures as well as institutional dynamics across and within nations. A common feature between France and Germany, however, was the pivotal role played by discretionary powers throughout the decision-making process, which revealed an increasing scepticism towards asylum claims. Neither normative formalisation nor internal and intergovernmental harmonisation seem to have had any durable effect to curb the agency of first-line officials tasked with sorting would-be asylum-seekers at the border. The legal framework that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s in both countries mostly consisted in translating existing practices into positive law, which left enormous room to changing interpretations and airport-specific, and often case-specific, status assessments. Therefore, it did not limit powers of border force officers so much as it gave firmer legal ground to a mechanism built first and foremost on law enforcement's discretion, which in turn resulted in considerable divergences in the processing of comparable situations. While some civil society actors—NGOs, religious figures, doctors—only slowly gained access to French and German airport border spaces in the 1990s, which allowed them to exert a growing influence over admission decisions, asylum pre-screenings often pitted ministries of the Interior on the one hand, against ministries of Foreign Affairs and asylum authorities on the other, whose administrative cultures and priorities were different. In that sense, airport asylum in the late 20th century could be construed, following the insights of present-day sociological analyses, as a slow-onset 'battleground' (Campomori and Ambrosini 2020), where local actors engaged in a struggle over admission decisions, albeit with few participants and rare civil society organisations before the mid-1990s.

What this article also suggests is that as the volume of rejected asylum-seekers at airports surged at the end of the Cold War in Western Europe, the newly formalised pre-screening procedures at airports reinforced a culture of doubt towards perceived 'fake' refugees. This reinforced as well as shaped border

practices, which then found their way into refugee law in the 1990s and 2000s. Thus, one can say that air borders emerged as a testing ground where distinctions between genuine refugees and those supposedly unworthy of protection were cultivated, contested and mainstreamed. Part of that period's legacy can be traced down, in particular, to the hotspot approach elaborated in 2015 (Calarco 2024) and mainstreamed into EU law by the so-called Migration and Asylum Pact in 2024, whereby keeping asylum-seekers at borders for pre-screening purposes became mandatory for all Member States. Although the current configuration of, and struggle over, filtering mechanisms at Europe's external borders involve more institutional actors, in particular NGOs, than in the 1980 and 1990s (Bonizzoni and Dimitriadis 2024), a large part of the institutional suspicion against would-be refugees and the unreasonable notion that one may quickly sort migrants from refugees (Hamlin 2021) hearkens back to that period. With the benefit of hindsight, the complex interplay among policy, practice and institutional dynamics that comes to light underscores the profound impact of air border controls on the evolution of refugee law and the treatment of asylum-seekers in France, Germany and Western Europe more broadly.

**Data Availability Statement**

No data is available. This piece is a historical article mostly based on publicly available archives, and no data repository has been used for this work.

**Endnotes**

<footnote n="1">¹ OFPRA Archives, DIR 3/38, Draft memo by Hubert Prévot, Secrétariat général à l'intégration, about the creation of a group on migration control, 12.02.1990; 'Tips zum Verfassungsbruch', *Der Spiegel*, n°46/1992, 8.11.1992.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² German Federal Archives (Koblenz), B106/101013, V II 3, 125,415, 16+IV, Band 2, 31.01.1986, Letter from the BAFI Director to the Federal Ministry of the Interior.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ OFPRA, DIR 3/38, 'Asile à la frontière, 1989-1990', memo entitled 'L'Asile. Mesures relevant du ministère de l'Intérieur', from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 7.05.1990.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ UNHCR, Note on non-refoulement, EC/SCP/2, 23.08.1977.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ UNHCR, 1983, 'The problem of manifestly unfounded or abusive applications for refugee status or asylum', Conclusion No. 30 (XXXIV), UN Doc A/38/12/Add.1, paragraph c.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ UNHCR, 1983, 'The problem of manifestly unfounded or abusive applications for refugee status or asylum', Conclusion No. 30 (XXXIV), UN Doc A/38/12/Add.1, paragraph c.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Id., paragraph d.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ Id., paragraph d.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ Council of the European Union, 'Council Resolution of 30 November 1992 on Manifestly Unfounded Applications for Asylum' ('London Resolution'), 30.11.1992, Article 1 a.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Council of the European Union, 'Council Resolution of 30 November 1992 on Manifestly Unfounded Applications for Asylum' ('London Resolution'), 30.11.1992, Article 1 a.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ OFPRA Archives, DIR 3/38, Memo by the DFAE, 8.11.1992.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² OFPRA Archives, DIR 4/34, Memo on the Division de l'asile à la frontière and talking points for a meeting between OFPRA and ANAFÉ, 15.05.2006.</footnote>
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<footnote n="13">13 Décret n°82-442 du 27 mai 1982 pris pour l'application des articles 5, 5-1 et 5-3 de l'ordonnance n°45-2658 du 2 novembre 1945 modifiée relative aux conditions d'entrée et de séjour des étrangers en France, en ce qui concerne l'admission sur le territoire français.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 OFPRA Archives, DIR 3/38, 'Demandes d'asile dans les aéroports, 1991-1992', France Terre d'Asile, transcript of a meeting between Amrani and Moreau, Secretary General of OFPRA, 7.01.1992.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 French National Archives, 19,990,260/4, 'Dossier directeur remis à jour—19 juin', cable from the Minister of Foreign Affairs to the Permanent Representative to the UNHCR in Geneva [no date, 1993].</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 Note du chef de la P.A.F. CDG au chef du Service central de la PAF, SEC n°89.01638, 26.07.1989; Interview with Mr. B., former member of the P.A.F. (French Border force) at Charles-de-Gaulle airport, 13.05.2022.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17 See OFPRA Archives, DIR 3/37 and 3/38, Interview transcripts.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18 Interview with É. Noir, OFPRA officer, 19.05.2005, quoted in Makaremi (2010, 200).</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 UNHCR, Note on International Protection, 4.06.1999, EC/49/SC/CRP.12.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20 OFPRA Archives, DIR 3/38, 'Statistics'.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">21 OFPRA Archives, DIR 3/37, Dossier d'examen du Conseil constitutionnel, Comptes rendus des débats de l'Assemblée nationale, compte rendu provisoire p. 12, 21.01.1992.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">22 Cons. Const. (France), 25.02.1992, n°92-307, §22.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">23 A similar restrictive turn affected the 'credible fear' standard applied by U.S. immigration officials, which was initially meant to repel 'frivolous' applications but was soon used to perform a more in-depth assessment (Ignatius 1994).</footnote>

<footnote n="24">24 ECtHR, 26.04.2007, Gebremedhin [Gaberamadhien] v. France, No. 25389/05.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">25 Hessen Archives (HHStAw) Wiesbaden, B. 937, Nr. 6, Memo from the GSamt Frankfurt/Main, G10-01318, PK 2130/PK 2170, 22.11.1995, 'Rückführung von Ausländern auf dem Luftweg—Nigerianische Staatsangehörige'.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">26 Bundesverfassungsgericht, 14.05.1996, NJW 1996, 1665, 1666. See also Decree of 10.07.1987 from the Minister of the Interior to the BAFI, VII 3125415-2/1.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">27 London Resolution on manifestly unfounded applications, 30.11.1992, art. 1 b, art. 8, and London Resolution on a harmonised approach to questions concerning host third countries, 30.11.1992, art. 2 c.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">28 Interview of Mr. F..., former member of the P.A.F. (French Border force), 12.09.2023.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">29 Art. 18a of the *Asylverfahrengesetz*, adopted on 16.07.1982 (law on the asylum procedure).</footnote>

<footnote n="30">30 Private Archives of J.M. Balanant, Conseil d'administration d'Aéroports de Paris, 'Rapport au Conseil d'administration sur le traitement des demandeurs d'asile et des non-admis', January 1992, 48.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">31 German Federal Archives (Koblenz), B 106380204, BMI, BGS II 2, 645,348/2, Band 5, Letter from the Minister of the Interior of Nordrhein-Westfalen to the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI), 10.07.1994.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">32 Quoted in Gottstein (1998, 10–11).</footnote>

<footnote n="33">33 OFPRA Archives, 1 av. 487, video interview with Laurence D., former member of DAF at OFPRA, 2011.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">34 OFPRA Archives, DIR 3/38, 'Agents de l'Office dans les aéroports: la critique syndicale et associative'.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">35 OFPRA Archives, DIR 3/38, OFPRA-DFAE meeting in Fontenay-sous-Bois 16.10.1991.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">36 This exceptional procedure was upheld in 2022 by France's constitutional court: see Conseil constitutionnel, 17.03.2022, n°2021-983 QPC.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">37 Conseil Constitutionnel (France), 25.02.1992, n°92-307.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">38 Interview of Mr. L..., former member of the P.A.F. (French Border force), 22.03.2022.</footnote>

<footnote n="39">39 Interview of Mr. L..., former member of the P.A.F. (French Border force), 22.03.2022.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">40 Interview of Mr. L..., former member of the P.A.F. (French Border force), 22.03.2022.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">41 Interview of Mr. L..., held at Paris CDG airport in November 1991, 8.07.2022.</footnote>

<footnote n="42">42 OFPRA Archives, DIR 3/38, Memo from the Ministry of the Interior, DLPAJ, LIB/CAB/I/N°166, 16.04.1991, 'Échéancier de règlement des problèmes que pose la procédure d'asile frontalier'.</footnote>
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