Romania has one of the lowest asylum application rates in the EU, study shows
Although the number of asylum applications to EU countries is continuously increasing, most of them go to Germany or Sweden while Romania has one of the lowest application rates in the European Union.
According to a Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung study, almost 40% of all asylum applications registered in the first quarter of 2015 went to Germany, 25% went towards Sweden, and 18% were registered in Hungary. Only 0.2% of all asylum applications went to Romania.
“Besides the fact that Romania received only 1,585 requests for asylum in 2014, it accepted only 47% of them. In contrast, Sweden accepted 77% of 39,905 applications,” according to the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung statement cited by local Agerpres.
In terms of origin, only 20% of the 626,000 asylum seekers registered in 2014 were from Syria. For this year, the estimations show that 40% of the 950,000 asylum seekers come from this country.
So far, figures show that Europe hosts more than 428,000 asylum seekers at a population of some 500 million people. In comparison, Turkey receives 1.93 million asylum seekers, Lebanon – 1.11 million, and Jordan – more than 629,000.
The data used for the study come from Eurostat and the UN Refugee Agency.
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Irina Popescu, irina.popescu@romania-insider.com
