More than 100,000 applications for international protection from Syrians in exile are under consideration in the 27 EU Member States, according to figures released on Wednesday by the European Union asylum agency, EUAA.
At the end of October, there were just over 108,200 applications awaiting a first decision, bearing in mind that rejections may be appealed, the EUAA said.
These figures were made public at a time when the authorities in several Member States, including Germany, Italy, Sweden and Belgium, have announced that they are suspending the processing of asylum applications from Syrians following the fall of Bashar al-Assad's government last weekend.
Since the start of the war in Syria in 2011, some 13 million people - more than half the country's population - have fled their homes, according to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR.
While nearby countries such as Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt have taken in the vast majority of the six million Syrian refugees, many have also fled to Europe.
In the EU, Germany was the leading host country, with almost 800,000 Syrian refugees or asylum seekers, while Sweden came second. In other Member States, Syrians continued to rank first in terms of asylum applications.
According to the EUAA, the number of cases awaiting a decision in first instance fell by 6% in one year.
Faster processing of applications led to 128,500 Syrians being granted some form of international protection between January and October. Of these, some 28% (almost 35,500 cases) were requests for refugee status, according to the European agency.
Belgium, which is one of the countries that have suspended the examination of asylum applications from people from Syria, claims that around 35,000 Syrians have received protection on its soil over the past decade. France had 45,600 Syrian refugees in 2024.
These two countries have each said that they have received around 4,500 new applications from Syrians since the beginning of this year, twice as many as Norway, for example.
