Asylum Report 2025 - Executive summary

Legislative and policy debates in 2024 centred around building resilient and efficient asylum systems. Efforts focused on making procedures faster and optimising the use of available resources, including through institutional restructuring, the digitalisation of procedures, and training and professional development. Nevertheless, challenges were reported at times about the possibility to receive advice and counselling at the very beginning of the procedure, especially at the borders and in detention.

Making use of up-to-date country of origin information (COI), EU+ countries adapted their policies and decision-making practices toward certain profiles of applicants. For example, following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria in December 2024 and unclear situation in the country, EU+ countries suspended decisions on the protection needs of Syrian applicants. Courts played a key role in shaping practices related to safe country concepts and subsequent applications. While these rulings interpreted provisions of the (recast) Asylum Procedures Directive (APD), they are also expected to serve as indications for the implementation of new requirements in the Asylum Procedure Regulation (APR).

In 2024, EU+ asylum authorities issued 795,000 first instance decisions on asylum applications. This is the most since 2017. For the fourth year in a row, the most decisions were issued by Germany and France, together accounting for almost one-half of the EU+ total.

Despite the increased number of decisions taken in many countries, there were 981,000 pending cases at the end of December 2024 – among the highest on record. Against this background, many authorities focused on making the asylum procedure even quicker and aimed to clear out their backlogs as much as possible before the mandatory application of the Pact in June 2026 in order to avoid having to apply old and new rules in parallel (depending on the date of the application) for an extensive amount of time. In addition to staff recruitment and digitalisation, authorities applied different case load management methods to increase their efficiency. Despite these measures, asylum procedures remained lengthy in some countries and the number of pending cases continued to increase.

Efforts to increase efficiency also focused on appeals procedures. The higher number of cases pending on an appeal prompted courts to invest in hiring additional staff and increasing processing capacity. To improve the quality of judicial processes, several courts provided continuous professional development for judges, often with the support of the EUAA.