Taking account of the specificities of the European Union (EU) legal order and drawing on the jurisprudence of the relevant courts at European and international level, this chapter advocates for a return to the basics of treaty interpretation, as a way to solving the interpretative impasse. It proposes a method of systemic and (meta-)teleological construction, relying on the human rights standards contained in the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the founding values of the organisation.This demonstrates that autonomy and purposiveness in the interpretation of specialised rules do not automatically amount to autarky and fragmentation. The autonomous reading of EU asylum law does not produce a conflict of norms with international humanitarian law (IHL) that would require the invocation of the  lex specialis  standard, in either of the acceptions identified by the International Law Commission.  Keywords: European Union (EU) asylum law, human rights, international humanitarian law (IHL), International Law Commission