Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union

F2: Population and migration

2920 Luxembourg LUXEMBOURG

On 22 March 2022, Eurostat’s Director General addressed the Directors General and Presidents of the NSIs (National Statistical Institutes) in the European Statistical System inviting them to contribute professionally to European actions to support Ukraine by ensuring the timelier availability of the necessary statistics. More specifically, the Partnership Group stressed that population data are crucial in this situation and would need to be prioritised. The Directors of Social Statistics underlined the importance of comparable statistics covering statistics on temporary protection. 

In line with the ESS commitment to provide relevant and timely official statistics, Eurostat asked Member States and EFTA countries to transmit voluntary monthly data within one month following the end of reference period and for the first time by the end of April for the reference month March 2022 for the following data series within the framework of Eurostat data collections in the field of Asylum and international protection (Article 4 of the Council Regulation (EC) No 862/2007): 

• First instance decisions during the reference period granting temporary protection status by age, sex and citizenship (flow data).
• First instance decisions during the reference period granting temporary protection status to unaccompanied minors by age, sex and citizenship (flow data).
• Beneficiaries of temporary protection at the end of the month by citizenship, age and sex (stock data).
• Unaccompanied minors benefiting of temporary protection at the end of the month by citizenship, age and sex (stock data).

Temporary protection status and conditions of applications are defined by Council Directive 2001/55/EC of 20 July 2001 whereas Council implementing decision (EU) 2022/382 of 4 March 2022 establishing the existence of a mass influx of displaced persons from Ukraine within the meaning of Article 5 of Directive 2001/55/EC is the first one having the effect of introducing temporary protection. 

These data are supplied to Eurostat by the national Ministries of Interior and related official or statistical agencies. Data is presented by country and for groups of countries: the European Member States and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). 

Provided data may differ from operational data collected by European or International agencies like EUAA (European Union Asylum Agency) or UNHCR.

Asylum migration - international protection statistics

All data refer explicitly to the number of persons covered by the decisions granting temporary protection status. 

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

Time series on temporary protection are available from reference month March 2022.

Not applicable.

The unit of measure is the absolute number of persons.

Calendar month (flow and stock data), or calendar quarter (flow data).

The compilation of statistics on asylum is based on Article 4 of Council Regulation (CE) No 862/2007 of 11 July 2007 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)) of 11 March 2009 (OJ L 87, p. 164), 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.

Not applicable - data on Asylum applications 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 (see item 10 - 'Accessibility and clarity') 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 temporary protection will be used in the frame of our periodical News publications.

Our News can be found under this portal: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/migration-asylum/asylum/publications.

Data on temporary protection will be used regularly in the frame of periodical publications.

Our latest publications can be downloaded for free from this portal:
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/migration-asylum/asylum/publications

Moreover Eurostat produces statistical articles via the Statistics Explained platform. 

Please consult data on-line https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/migration-asylum/asylum/database, or refer to contact details.

Not applicable.

Not applicable.

See annexes.

An Asylum Metadata questionnaire has been developped by Eurostat to ensure the compliance of Member States with requirements of Article 4 of Regulation (EC) 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. 

Furtermore, 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 two years a dedicated Working Group on Asylum statistics where quality and methodological issues are discussed with the data providers (Member States). Eurostat also undertakes compliance monitoring visits to Member States, during which it reviews and consults the data providers on methodological issues.

Temporary protection data, as asylum statistics, are, mainly based on administrative sources. Certain differences in definitions and practices for producing those statistics may exist between countries. However, the Member States are generally following the requirements of the Regulation (EC) 862/2007) and the quality of the data may be assessed as good or very good.

Users of Eurostat asylum statistics including temporary protection data are:

• various policy DGs in the European Commission, like DG HOME AFFAIRS for desinging, funding and implementing asylum related policies in the EU
• the European Parliament
• national authorities (Ministries of Interior, Ministries of Justice, Migration agencies) who use Asylum data to monitor or project the development of their national asylum procedures
• the 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 users 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 temporary protection data depends largely on the availability of the data from the relevant data providers (National Statistical Institutes, Interior ministries or migration related agencies). Since the data collection is carried out on a voluntary basis, the completeness of the data may vary.

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 the Asylum data collection is considered to be high.

The Asylum data are collected mainly through national administrative sources (registers in Ministries of Interior or related Immigration Agencies). It follows that accuracy of the Asylum data depends largely on the accuracy and efficiency of the underlying administrative systems of the national data providers.

Main sources of errors are:

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

EU aggregate:

• EU aggregate is calculated as the sum of Member States’ data, and can be overestimated because of the possibility for the same third-country national to be counted as beneficiary of temporary in several Member States

Not applicable.

Measurement error in the register

Data are sent to Eurostat by the reporting countries no later than one month 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.

Main possible issue concerning comparability of data on temporary protection could result from the difference existing between national temporary protection schemes and European temporary protection status, but both types of status shall be included collected statistics on temporary protection.

Explanatory notes by countries and concepts will be provided when available in the annexes at the bottom of this page.

Not applicable yet

Not applicable

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

For a list of the validation rules and procedures which Asylum data go through before they are considered ERROR-FREE and publishable, please see sub-concept 20.4 below (Data validation).

In March 2014 Eurostat has drafted and proposed a Revision Policy for Asylum statistics in the Working Group meeting with the national data providers.

Please find this revision policy in the Annex of the latest Technical Guidelines (please see Annexes of this metadata file).

Currently, Asylum 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 Interior or Immigration Agencies. 

Data on temporary protection are intended to be collected on a monthly basis. Quarterly data corresponds to aggregation of monthly data.

This data collection is administered by Eurostat. The statistics are collected by the responsible data providers (National statistical Institutes, Interior Ministries or Migration related Agencies) and are supplied to Eurostat.

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

Currently, 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.

For more details on the validation of the Asylum statistics, please refer to the Technical Guidelines document in the Annexes part of this metadata file.

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 have been rounded to the nearest 5.

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

Explanatory notes are provided in the Annexes at the bottom of this page.