On Monday, the European Commission unveiled that nearly a quarter (24.3 percent to be exact) of new asylum applicants in 2023 were under 18 years old, not including data from France, Poland, and Cyprus.
Earlier in 2023, Eurostat announced a 20 percent increase in new asylum claims across the EU, bringing the total to roughly 1.049 million – the third highest annual total since the peak of the Syrian civil war in 2015 and 2016.
Children were the focus of 254,900 of the initial applications lodged in 2023, with 17 percent of these applications from children who had traveled alone.
As outlined by Eurostat’s data, the largest percentage of child asylum seekers was recorded in Austria with 34.5 percent of all applications, followed closely by Luxembourg and Hungary with 34.4 and 33.3 percent respectively. The highest proportion of single minors among new applicants was logged in Bulgaria at 17.2 percent, trailed by the Netherlands and Austria. 120,915 minors were granted asylum last year.
In 2023, the vast majority of underage asylum applicants in the EU were from Asia, accounting for 44.4 percent of all applications, primarily from Syria and Afghanistan. A significant number of applicants also came from non-EU European countries such as Turkey and Russia, amounting to 20.2 percent of total applications. The remaining child applicants hailed from Africa (19.8 percent – chiefly Somalia and Eritrea) and the Americas (14.4 percent – predominantly Venezuelans and Colombians).
As laid down in Article 2 of Directive 2011/95/EU, the term “asylum applicant” denotes individuals from outside the EU who have sought international protection or were included as family members in such applications within an EU member state. First-time applicants are those who filed a protection application for the first time in an EU member state.
Moreover, the statistics on first-time asylum applicants also take into account those covered under the EU’s Dublin Regulation (Regulation 604/2013/EU), which aims to speed up the processing of applications by assigning responsibility to one EU member state based on certain criteria.
The recent surge in initial asylum applications has become a critical point of discussion within the EU. This influx has amplified challenges such as a lack of housing and pressure on the EU’s external borders, leading to the adoption of the new Pact on Migration and Asylum earlier this month by the EU parliament. The new pact is aimed at setting new guideline on managing migration and establishing a common asylum system within the EU.