Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union

Unit F2: Population and migration

2920 Luxembourg LUXEMBOURG

Data series on decisions on asylum applications and resettlement contain statistical information based on Article 4 of the Regulation (EC) No 862/2007 with reference to:

• Persons covered by first instance decisions rejecting applications for international protection by age, sex, citizenship and status of minors;
• Persons covered by first instance decisions granting, revoking, ending or refusing to renew refugee status by age, sex, citizenship and status of minors;
• Persons covered by first instance decisions granting, revoking, ending or refusing to renew subsidiary protection status by age, sex, citizenship and status of minors;
• Persons covered by first instance decisions granting or withdrawing temporary protection by age, sex, citizenship and status of minors;
• Persons covered by other first instance decisions granting or withdrawing authorisation to stay for humanitarian reasons by age, sex, citizenship and status of minors;
• Persons covered by final decisions rejecting applications for international protection by age, sex, citizenship and status of minors;
• Persons covered by final decisions granting, revoking, ending or refusing to renew refugee status by age, sex, citizenship and status of minors;
• Persons covered by final decisions granting, revoking, ending or refusing to renew subsidiary protection status by age, sex, citizenship and status of minors;
• Persons covered by final decisions granting or withdrawing temporary protection by age, sex, citizenship and status of minors;
• Persons covered by other final decisions, taken in appeal or review, granting or withdrawing authorisations to stay for humanitarian reasons by age, sex, citizenship and status of minors;
• Persons who have been granted an authorisation to reside in a Member State within the framework of a national or Community resettlement scheme by age, sex, citizenship, status of minors, country of previous residence and type of decision.

These data are supplied to Eurostat by the national Ministries of the Interior, National Statistical Institutes and related immigration agencies.

Data are presented by country and aggregation for the European Union.

Data are rounded to the nearest 5.

The classification of codes on the reporting country (GEO), on the country of citizenship of asylum applicants (CITIZEN) and the country of previous residence (C_RESID) corresponds to the ISO 3166 code-list (3166-1 alpha-2) with the exception of:

• Greece where the code "EL" was adopted (instead of "GR") and
• United Kingdom where the code "UK" was adopted (instead of "GB"). 

Asylum migration - international protection statistics.

Statistical concepts and definitions for decisions on asylum applications and resettlement are based on definitions in Article 2 of Regulation (EC) No 862/2007, Article 2 of Directive 2011/95/EU and Directive 2013/32/EU.

First instance decision is a positive or negative decision considering applications for international protection as well as the grants of authorisations to stay for humanitarian reasons, including decisions under priority and accelerated procedures taken by administrative or judicial bodies in Member States.

Final decision is a positive or negative decisions considering applications for international protection as well as the grants of authorisations to stay for humanitarian reasons, including decisions under priority and accelerated procedures, in appeal or in review and which are no longer subject to remedy, taken by administrative or judicial bodies in Member States.

All data explicitly refer to the number of persons. The data on decisions on asylum applications are related to the number of persons rather than cases.

The statistical population for decisions on asylum applications and resettlement are third-country nationals, i.e. any person who is not a citizen of the European Union within the meaning of Article 17(1) of the Treaty, including stateless persons.

EU Member States, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland.

Croatia from January 2012.

United Kingdom by November 2020.

Montenegro from January 2018.

According Regulation (EC) No 862/2007, statistics on decisions on asylum applications and resettlement have been collected since January 2008.

However, some statistics collected previously on voluntary basis are also available for the period 1999-2007.

Not applicable.

The unit of measure is the absolute number of persons.

Calendar quarter and calendar year.

The compilation of statistics on decisions on asylum applications and resettlement is based on Article 4 of Regulation (EC) No 862/2007 and amending Regulation (EU) 2020/852, which depicts in detail the data provisions Member States are bound to supply Eurostat with.

Not applicable.

Regulation (EC) No 223/2009 on European statistics (recital 24 and Article 20(4)), stipulates the need to establish common principles and guidelines ensuring the confidentiality of data used for the production of European statistics and the access to those confidential data with due account for technical developments and the requirements of users in a democratic society.

Data on decisions on asylum applications and resettlement are not confidential.

Not applicable.

Not applicable.

In line with the Community legal framework and the European Statistics Code of Practice Eurostat disseminates European statistics on Eurostat's website respecting professional independence and in an objective, professional and transparent manner in which all users are treated equitably. The detailed arrangements are governed by the Eurostat protocol on impartial access to Eurostat data for users.

The database is updated two times per week, every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 11.00 a.m.

Data on decisions on asylum applications and resettlement are used in regular publications (News articles, Statistics Explained articles and other publications).

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/migration-asylum/asylum/publications

Data on decisions on asylum applications and resettlement are used in regular publications.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/migration-asylum/asylum/publications

Eurostat produce Statistics Explained articles:

Asylum statistics introduced

Asylum applications - monthly statistics

Annual asylum statistics

Data are online on the Eurostat website in the folder Decisions on applications and resettlement (migr_asydec).

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/migration-asylum/asylum/database

Not applicable.

Data are rounded to the nearest 5.

Due to the rounding, the sum of individuals may not necessarily match the given total.

The document Asylum - Eurostat guidelines to Asylum templates - 2021 onwards (Technical Guidelines for the data collection under art. 4.1-4.3 of amended Regulation (EC) No 862/2007 - Statistics on Asylum, Version 5.0 amended in December 2020, 2021 reference periods onwards) can be found in the Annexes.

See annexes.

An Asylum Metadata questionnaire has been developed by Eurostat to ensure the compliance of Member States with requirements of Article 4 of Regulation (EC) No 862/2007.

As given in the Article 9 of the Regulation, Member States must report to Eurostat on the data sources used, the reasons for the selection of these sources and the effects of the selected data on the quality of the statistics.

Member States compile the requested data following the guidelines and instructions provided by Eurostat. Before data publication, consistency validation checks are performed.

Furthermore, in order to ensure that the statistical practices used to compile the Asylum data are in compliance with the methodological requirements and that good practices in the field of Asylum statistics are being followed, Eurostat organises every year a dedicated Working Group on Asylum and managed migration (AMM) statistics where quality and methodological issues are discussed with the national data providers.

Asylum statistics are based on administrative sources. Certain differences in definitions and practices of producing asylum statistics exist between countries. However, the Member States are generally following the requirements of the Regulation (EC) No 862/2007 and the quality of the data may be assessed as good or very good.

Users of Eurostat asylum statistics are:

• various policy DGs in the European Commission, like DG Migration and Home Affairs for designing, funding and implementing asylum related policies in the EU,
• European Parliament,
• national authorities (Ministries of Interior, Ministries of Justice, immigration agencies) who use Asylum data to monitor or project the development of their national asylum procedures,
• European Migration Network (EMN) which uses the Asylum data as a basis for its annual EU and national level statistical and analytical reports,
• researchers and students conducting analysis and research in the field of asylum,
• journalists and international organisations in the area of asylum and migration.

Eurostat does not conduct user satisfaction surveys per se. Instead, the user satisfaction is monitored on a constant way through informal and formal contacts and communications with users and through requests and comments received by users.

The completeness of the decisions on asylum applications and resettlement data depends largely on the availability of the data from the relevant data providers (Ministries of the Interior, National Statistical Institutes and related immigration agencies).

The following table describes the completeness of the data for the period 2021-2022.

The accuracy of statistical outputs in the general statistical sense is the degree of closeness of estimates to the true values.

The overall assessment of the accuracy of data collection is considered to be high.

The Asylum data are collected mainly through national administrative sources (registers in Ministries of the Interior, National Statistical Institutes and related immigration agencies).

Main sources of errors are:

• differences in definitions by not recording a certain information, which may thus lead to over or under coverage of the target population, or
• errors in the administrative register system (less often, mainly of technical nature).

EU aggregate is calculated as the sum of data from all Member States. It may be overestimated because of a certain risk that the same third-country national could apply for asylum in other Member States during the same reference period. While such risk is limited for high frequency quarterly data, annual aggregates at the EU level (based on quarterly statistics) can be possibly more affected by such double counting.

Not applicable.

Not applicable.

Depending on the data periodicity, the data is provided to Eurostat by the reporting countries:

• Quarterly data: not later than 2 months after the end of the reference period,
• Annual data: not later than 3 months after the end of the reference period. 

Generally, data are released by Eurostat on the public online database approximately 3 working days immediately after their reception (given that they do not contain any errors). In exceptional cases (large revisions, further validation, technical reasons, etc.) data may be disseminated later than 3 working days.

The punctuality of the data is overall good.

Majority of countries are able to meet the requirements of transmitting the data within the deadlines foreseen in the Regulation (EC) No 862/2007.

However, it is often the case that few countries might transmit the data some days/weeks after the deadline. The number of countries, which provide delayed data can vary from period to period depending on problems that may arise in the respective national administrative systems.

The geographical comparability across countries may be affected by the fact that in some cases an applicant may submit a request in more than one country during the same reference period. 

The comparability over time of asylum applicants is affected by updates of requested statistics.

1. Period January 1985 – December 2007: data collected on the voluntary basis.
2. Period January 2008 – December 2014: data by Regulation (EC) No 862/2007.
3. Period January 2014 – December 2020: implementation of the new 2013 Asylum Guidelines.
4. Period from January 2021: implementation of the new 2021 Asylum Guidelines. 

Not applicable.

Internal consistency (between time, age, sex, country, citizenship) is ensured through various validation checks performed both by national data providers but also by Eurostat before data publication.

The types of statistics required under the Regulation (EC) No 862/2007 are needed also for national purposes, such as for the management of the national system for processing asylum applications. In almost all cases, the data is based on existing administrative and statistical systems. The specific burdens placed by the Regulation on national authorities are therefore related to the need to prepare particular disaggregations or tables that might not otherwise have been produced, and to the need to apply the harmonised statistical definitions and concepts. For some national authorities, this resulted in one-off costs associated with the necessary adaptations to methods, procedures and systems.

The extent of the additional burdens varied between Member States according to the degree of similarity between the existing national systems for migration statistics and the requirements of the Regulation. However, in most Member States and for most of the statistics covered by the Regulation, the additional costs and burden are believed to be relatively limited and to be proportionate to the benefits obtained at both EU and national level of having more complete and better harmonised migration statistics.

In March 2014, the Asylum and managed migration Working Group adopted a Revision Policy for Asylum statistics. 

Decisions on asylum applications and resettlement data are revised on a continuous basis according to the most recently updated data provided by the reporting countries.

Data are compiled from the administrative records of the national authorities, mainly the Ministries of the Interior, National Statistical Institutes or related immigration agencies.

Decisions on asylum applications and resettlement data are collected on quarterly or annual basis.

This data collection is administered by Eurostat. The statistics are collected by the responsible data providers (Ministries of the Interior, National Statistical Institutes or related immigration agencies) and are supplied to Eurostat.

A set of standardised validation checks are applied by Eurostat before publishing the data.

Data providers may transmit the data only in csv (comma separated value) templates (administered by Eurostat to Member States). The new validation service infrastructure is built around two components performing validation operations: one for structural validation (called STRUVAL) and one for content validation (called CONVAL).

The validation rules below are checked to ensure the internal consistency of the data:

• variable codes and values of data are from a predefined set of accepted code-lists and format;
• statistics are confronted against other relevant data (e.g. a 'total' value of a given disaggregation (dimension) should equal the sum of the disaggregated data);
• investigating inconsistencies in the statistics;
• analysis of size and sign of revision;
• verifying the statistics against expectations and domain intelligence;
• outlier detection.

Based on the national detailed figures transmitted by the national data providers, Eurostat derives European aggregates by applying common calculation method: the geographical aggregation is done by arithmetical sum, when there are no missing values among the components of the respective geographical aggregate. Otherwise, they are not calculated.

For some historical data, EU and other aggregates may be flagged with 'd' when data for at least one Member State is missing.

Data are rounded to the nearest 5.

Due to the rounding, the sum of individuals may not necessarily match the given total.

Metadata is continuously updated.