There has been an increase in the number of asylum seekers granted international protection in 2012, Eurostat said Tuesday.
According to data by the European statistical office, the 27 EU member states granted protection to 102 700 asylum seekers in 2012. This means 18 400 more accepted asylums seekers applications compared to a year earlier.
Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom and France are the countries where the highest number of persons was granted protection status last year. More than 22 000 applications were approved by the authorities in Berlin, 15 300 in Sweden, 14 600 in the UK and 14 300 were registered in France.
Eurostat said that all together, the four member states accounted for nearly two thirds of all those granted protection status in the EU27.
Syrians, Afghani and Somalis represented the largest groups of beneficiaries of protection status in the EU during the past year, with the number of Syrians topping 18 700. Last week, at the presentation of the OECD International Migration Outlook for 2013 in Brussels, EU Commissioner for home affairs Cecilia Malmström said that currently, there are around 40 000 Syrian asylum seekers in Europe (mainly in Sweden, Germany and Greece) waiting for granting of protection status.
Also last week, the European Parliament endorsed the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), a system of common procedures for receiving asylum seekers. The aim of the common system is to ensure fair and humane treatment of asylum seekers in Europe, wherever they arrive.
The EU has been aiming for a common asylum system since 1999. Under the new rules, asylum seekers will not be transferred to EU countries where there is a risk of inhuman or degrading treatment. Furthermore, a shortlist is included of the exceptional conditions that must be fulfilled in order to temporarily detain an asylum seeker.
Even though Commissioner Malmström called the endorsement of the (CEAS) a “historic achievement”, a group of eleven non-governmental organisations (NGOs) expressed their discontent with the "asylum package". The NGOs, among which Amnesty International, Caritas Europa and the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE), believe that even though the adopted sets of legislation is a “step forward” in the right direction, it provides a still imperfect legal framework for a Common European Asylum System that today only exists on paper. Some of their concerns include also prolonged detention of asylum seekers, lengthy delays in the examination of asylum claims, as well as lack of acknowledgement of vulnerability of certain groups of asylum seekers.
Recently, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, François Crépeau, also expressed concern over EU detention procedures, saying that detention as a tool for EU border control follows inadequate procedures.
According to Daphné Bouteillet-Paquet, former judge at the UNHCR Appeal Court and currently working as migration officer at Caritas Europa, better information of asylum seekers, provisions strengthening of the right to a personal interview, the right to an effective remedy and the better representation for unaccompanied children are amongst the most significant improvements in the “asylum package”. However, Caritas and the other NGOs are concerned that improvements on paper will never be translated into practice as a result of austerity measures. “Reality is that austerity measures are resulting in the downgrading of national asylum systems in practice,“ says Bouteillet-Paquet and adds: “Without a dramatic financial input, the common European asylum system will remain an empty box.”
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