EU reports 400,000 asylum applications in first half of year

400,000 asylum applications in the first half of the year according to the EU agency Keystone-SDA

The number of new asylum-seekers within the European Union and Switzerland and Norway fell significantly in the first half of the year. By the end of June, the EU Asylum Agency had counted almost 400,000 new applications, the agency announced on Monday.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

Compared to the first half of 2024, this represents a decrease of 114,000 or 23%. The statistics include figures from all EU countries as well as Switzerland and Norway.

There were a total of 399,000 applications in the 29 countries. France (78,000), Spain (77,000), Germany (70,000) and Italy (64,000) were far and away in the lead. In contrast to previous years, Germany was no longer number one.

+ Asylum in Switzerland: the most important figures at a glance

The authority attributed the decline in particular to the fall of Syria’s ruler Bashar al-Assad in December. For the first time in a decade, most new asylum-seekers (25,000) no longer came from the Mediterranean country but from Venezuela (49,000) in South America. A total of 42,000 people from Afghanistan applied for asylum.

Translated from German by DeepL/ts

How we work 

We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.  

Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.

If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at [e-mail]