The applicant, Syrian national, has applied for international protection in the Netherlands but the State Secretary considered that Romania is the state responsible to process the application and the Romanian authorities accepted the take back request. The applicant contested the Dublin transfer, and the Court of the Hague allowed the appeal, annulled the decision and referred the case back for re-examination. The Court of the Hague ruled that the State Secretary can no longer rely on the interstate principle of trust for Romania without examining whether the statements made by the applicant about his previous detention without access to legal aid or an interpreter are correct. According to the Court of the Hague, the State Secretary should also have examined the applicant’s statements that he was forced to provide his fingerprints and sign a form. Finally, the State Secretary should have received clarity about where the applicant had or could have received reception when he submitted an asylum application and what steps were taken to process his application for international protection.

The State Secretary contested the Court of the Hague decision and argued that the burden of proof was for the applicant to rebut the presumption derived from the interstate principle of mutual trust between Member States.

The Council of State ruled that, similarly to another case ruled on the same day (State Secretary for Justice and Security (Staatssecretaris van Justitie en Veiligheid) no 2 v Applicant) the State Secretary has correctly argued that in view of the principle of interstate mutual trust it is for the applicant to demonstrate, on the basis of general country information, that upon return he runs a real risk of treatment contrary to Article 3 of the ECHR and Article 4 of the EU Charter. This demonstration cannot be done solely by invoking the AIDA Country Report: Romania, 2019 update", published on 29 April 2020, and the applicant did not make it plausible in any other way. The Council of State mentioned that it does not follow from the AIDA report that Dublin applicants are systematically detained in Romania or that there are structural deficiencies in the access to legal aid and reception conditions that would reach a particularly high threshold of seriousness within the meaning of the Jawo judgment of the CJEU. The Council of State also noted that the State Secretary did not have any reason to accept the application pursuant to Article 17(1) of the Dublin Regulation in the absence of plausible information on special personal facts and circumstances that should have given rise to this.