Eurostat report on asylum applications in EU

Greece has the fourth-highest number of asylum applications relative to its population among European Union countries, after Malta, Cyprus and Sweden, according to a report released on Friday by the European statistics agency Eurostat.

In terms of the absolute number of applications received, Greece ranked fifth with 19,900, with France at the top of the list with 41,800 and the UK second with 30,500 (though the UK figure covers only new applicants). – www.ana.gr

Eurostat said that EU countries turned down the majority of asylum applications submitted to them in 2008 with the exception of Malta, which approved more than half (1,410 out of 2,685).

In 2008, there were nearly 240,000 asylum applicants registered in the EU27, or 480 applicants per million inhabitants. The main countries of citizenship of these applicants were Iraq (29,000 or 12% of the total number of applicants), Russia (21,100 or 9%), Somalia (14,300 or 6%), Serbia (13,600 or 6%) and Afghanistan (12,600 or 5%).

In 2008, the EU27 made 193,690 first instance decisions on asylum applicants. There were 141,730 rejections (73% of decisions), 24,425 applicants (13%) were granted refugee status, 18,560 (10%) subsidiary protection and 8,970 (5%) were granted authorisation to stay for humanitarian reasons.

Greece received 19,885 asylum applications from immigrants in 2008. The largest numbers of these applicants were from Pakistan (35 percent), Afghanistan (11 percent) and Georgia (11 percent). In 2008, Greece considered 29,460 asylum applications in total, granted refugee status in 380 cases (1.3 percent) and rejected 29,080 cases.

The country with the largest number of asylum applications per million inhabitants was Malta (6,350), followed by Cyprus (4,370), Sweden (2,710), Greece (1,775), Austria (1,530) and Belgium (1,495).

The Eurostat report was released one day after the European Parliament passed a resolution proposing measures to protect the rights of asylum seekers and to simplify the system for granting refugee status in the member-states. – www.ana.gr