EU: 260,000 asylum applicants in 2010

[News_Editor]

EU: 260,000 asylum applicants in 2010

2011-03-29 19:58:28 GMT+7 (ICT)

BRUSSELS (BNO NEWS) -- The European Union (EU) in 2010 registered around 260,000 asylum applicants, 90 percent of them being new applicants and around 10 percent repeat applicants, the EU's statistical office said Tuesday.

According to a report released by the EU's Eurostat, there were 257,800 asylum applicants registered, which represents 515 applicants per million inhabitants. The numbers are similar to the previous year, as in 2009, there were 264,000 asylum applicants.

The main countries of citizenship of these applicants in 2010 were Afghanistan (20,600 or 8 percent of the total number of applicants), Russia (18,500 or 7 percent), Serbia (17,700 or 7 percent), Iraq (15,800 or 6 percent) and Somalia (14,400 or 6 percent).

The Eurostat revealed that 222,100 first instance decisions were made on asylum applications.

There were 167,000 rejections (75 percent of decisions), 27,000 applicants (12 percent) were granted refugee status, 20,400 (9 percent) subsidiary protection and 7,600 (3 percent) were granted authorization to stay for humanitarian reasons.

Some first instance decisions made in 2010 may refer to applications registered in previous years, Eurostat noted, adding that if the proportion of positive decisions varied considerably among Member States, the country of origin of applicants also differs greatly between Member States.

The report also revealed that the highest number of applicants were recorded in France (51,600 applicants) followed by Germany (48,500), Sweden (31,900), Belgium (26,100), the United Kingdom (23,700), the Netherlands (15,100), Austria (11,100), Greece (10,300), Italy (10,100) and Poland (6,500).

These ten Member States accounted for more than 90 percent of applicants registered in the EU27 area in 2010.

When compared with the population of each Member State, the highest rates of applicants registered were recorded in Cyprus (3,600 applicants per million inhabitants), Sweden (3,400), Belgium (2,400), Luxembourg (1,600) and Austria (1,300).

The report showed that in some Member States, a large proportion of the applicants came from a single country. The Member States with the highest concentrations were Poland (73 percent of the applicants came from Russia), Lithuania (50 percent from Georgia), Bulgaria (44 percent from Iraq), Latvia (38 percent from Afghanistan) and Hungary (33 percent from Afghanistan).

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