The Asylum Seeker as a Jurisdictional Anomaly: Jurisdictional Filtering and the Reconfiguration of Protection in European Union Asylum Law

European Union asylum law increasingly relies on preliminary procedural mechanisms that may affect whether, where, and through which procedure a protection claim is examined on its merits. This article examines the cumulative significance of responsibility allocation, inadmissibility, border procedures, screening, and third-country mechanisms through doctrinal and conceptual analysis, using developments in UK asylum law as a secondary contrastive point of reference. It uses the concept of jurisdictional filtering to describe the operation of preliminary mechanisms that may redirect, defer, or condition the route to substantive examination and jurisdictional engineering to identify their systemic organization and interaction without assuming a single legislative strategy. Its principal conceptual contribution is the notion of jurisdictional anomaly, which describes the legal position of a person who remains subject to state immigration authority and applicable protection safeguards while preliminary determinations may still affect whether, where, and through which procedure the protection claim will be substantively examined. The article argues that the analytical significance of these mechanisms lies in their cumulative procedural and institutional effects rather than in any suspension of protection obligations. Non-refoulement and other applicable safeguards remain operative, while the route to merits determination may be procedurally differentiated.