Asylum statistics July 2016

The CGRS has released its asylum figures for July 2016.

Evolution

  • In July 2016, the Immigration Office registered 1,322 asylum applicants in Belgium. Every person (including children) concerned by an asylum application is counted as an asylum applicant.
  • This is an increase of 21.4 % compared to June 2016 (1,089) and a decrease of 63.3 % compared to July 2015 (3,601).
  • Compared to the second half of 2015, the number of asylum applicants remains low. Whereas during the last six months of 2015, there was a monthly average of 5,505 asylum applicants, this dropped to an average of 1,553 for the first six months of 2016.
  • This low number of asylum applications is mainly due to a sharp decline in the number of asylum applicants from Afghanistan (from 2,176 in December 2015 to 158 in July 2016), Syria (from 1,076 in December 2015 to 245 in July 2016) and Iraq (from 494 in December 2015 to 79 in July 2016).

Men - women - CHILDREN

  • In July 2016, there were more males (including children) than females who applied for asylum in Belgium (respectively 60.81 % and 39.19 %).  This ratio was 60.65 % to 39.35 % in the previous month.
  • In July 2016, 107 unaccompanied foreign (self-declared) minors applied for asylum in Belgium. This is a marked decrease compared to the period from August to December 2015, when a monthly average of 511 unaccompanied foreign (self-declared) minors requested asylum in Belgium.

Countries of origin

  • In July 2016, Syria was the main country of origin of asylum applicants in Belgium (242 applications, i.e. 22.3 %), followed by Afghanistan (129 applications, i.e. 11.9 %) and Undetermined country of origin (86 applications, i.e. 7.9 %).
  • Somalia and Albania completed the top five of countries of origin in July 2016, with respectively 6.1 % (66 applications) and 5.5 % (60 applications) of the total number of asylum applicants.

Decisions

  • In July 2016, the CGRS took 1,728 decisions, concerning a total of 2,099 persons.
  • In July 2016, compared to the total number of persons who received a final decision, the proportion of persons who were granted refugee status (47.7 %) or subsidiary protection status (12.1 %) amounted to 59.8 %. This corresponds to 930 decisions, concerning 1,172 persons. This is in line with 2015, when the CGRS granted international protection status in 6 out of 10 decisions.

Backlog

  • The total caseload of the CGRS is the number of asylum cases in which the CGRS has not yet taken a decision. At the end of July 2016, the total caseload amounted to 17.226 cases. In 2015, the caseload doubled from 5,589 asylum cases to 11,305. For three months now, the caseload has been decreasing again. As the CGRS considers 4,500 cases a normal caseload, the actual backlog amounts to 12,726 asylum cases.
18 August 2016

Information about the asylum procedure, tailored to the asylum seeker, can be found at : asyluminbelgium.be.