Asylum statistics May 2016

The CGRS has released its asylum figures for May 2016.

Evolution

  • In May 2016, the Immigration Office registered 1,193 asylum applicants in Belgium. Every person (including children) concerned by an asylum application is counted as an asylum applicant.
  • This is a decrease of 8.2 % compared to April 2016 (1,300) and of 43 % compared to May 2015 (2,094).
  • The figure of 1,193 asylum applicants is the lowest in eight years.
  • Compared to the second half of 2015, the number of asylum applicants has dropped significantly. Whereas during the last five months of 2015, there was a monthly average of 5,886 asylum applicants, this dropped to 1,646 for the first five months of 2016.
  • This decrease is mainly due to a sharp decline in the number of asylum applicants from Afghanistan (from 2,176 in December 2015 to 198 in May 2016), Syria (from 1,076 in December 2015 to 105 in May 2016) and Iraq (from 494 in December 2015 to 67 in May 2016).

Men - women - children

  • In May 2016, there were more males (including children) than females who applied for asylum in Belgium (respectively 66.44 % and 33.56 %).  This ratio was 64.17 % to 35.38 % in the previous month.
  • In May 2016, 104 (self-declared) unaccompanied foreign 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 (self-declared) unaccompanied foreign minors requested asylum in Belgium.

Countries of origin

  • In May 2016, Afghanistan was the main country of origin of asylum applicants in Belgium (198 applications, i.e. 16.6 %), followed by Syria (105 applications, i.e. 8.8 %) and Somalia (93 applications, i.e. 7.8 %).
  • Russia and Iraq completed the top five of countries of origin in May 2016, with respectively 6 % and 5.6 % of the total number of asylum applicants.

Decisions

  • In May 2016, the CGRS took 1,801 decisions, concerning a total of 2,308 persons.
  • In May 2016, compared to the total number of persons who received a final decision, the proportion of persons who were granted refugee status (51.6 %) or subsidiary protection status (11.2 %) amounted to 62.8 %. This corresponds to 1,033 decisions concerning 1,372 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 May 2016, the total caseload amounted to 18,302 cases. In 2015, the caseload doubled from 5,589 asylum cases to 11,305. In May 2016, the caseload dropped slightly for the first time this year. As the CGRS considers 4,500 cases a normal caseload, the actual backlog amounts to 13.802 asylum cases.

 

21 June 2016

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