The EMN Glossary – as one of the key products of the EMN - improves comparability by enabling a common understanding and use of terms and definitions relating to asylum and migration. The Glossary draws on a variety of sources, but primarily on the legislation of the EU asylum and immigration acquis, and makes terms available in the majority of EU Member State languages.

This online version of the Glossary is version 6.0 and was updated in March 2018 with the addition of 29 new terms reflecting the most recent European policy on migration and asylum. In addition, amendments to existing entries have been made to reflect new concepts and terminology, as well as evolutions in the usage of existing terms that have been introduced through new legislation and policy on asylum and migration in the EU. The new and updated terms reflect all developments since the adoption of the European Agenda on Migration of May 2015.

While remaining its main focus on legal developments in the framework of the EU acquis on asylum and migration, the Glossary also increasingly considers developments in the external dimension, at the same time acknowledging the needs of practitioners working in the field. As in the past, it also considers the terminology used in recent EMN studies amongst other key documents.

Each glossary entry is comprised of a preferred term, a definition of the concept that this term represents, the source/sources of the definition, plus notes and relationships to other terms (synonyms, broader and narrower terms as well as related terms) included in the Glossary.

The online version is regularly updated by the members of the EMN Glossary and Thesaurus Working Group (GTWG). Printed versions are only published if they contain substantial changes. The last printed version was published as Version 6.0 in May 2018 and is available for download as an interactive pdf version by following this link: English (en) [7 MB].

The EMN Glossary version 3.0 was published in the following EU languages, as well as Arabic:  Spanish (es) [4 MB], French (fr) [4 MB], Italian (it) [3 MB], Lithuanian (lt),  Portuguese [4 MB], and Arabic [7 MB] .
The EMN Glossary version 5.0 reflects the information available in December 2016, it was published in the following EU languages: Deutsch (de) and Suomi (fi). Learn more about the methodology of the glossary