another effort to shorten the asylum process in european countries has been to harmonize their asylum policies. here the idea is that all countries adopt the same standards and share information about asylum seekers, so that if they are rejected in one country they will be rejected by all. such harmonization is intended to discourage what is sometimes called 'asylum shopping',whereby an asylum seeker asks for asylum in one country after being rejected in another and repeats this process with the hope of eventually getting it somewhere.
While these policies may well be sensible in principle, critics charge that, in practice, such policies are fraught with pitfalls. Shortening the length of time to make an asylum decision