Portugal grants refugee status to 71% of requests

Seven out of ten requests for refugee status in 2022 received a positive response from Portugal, the country in the European Union with the highest percentage of approvals, according to a report by the High Committee for Migration (ACM).

“While Portugal still does not stand out among applicants for international protection, in 2022 it was the European Union 27 (EU27) country with the highest relative importance of granting refugee status among the total number of decisions rendered,” emphasizes the ACM document, which will be presented on Friday at Lisbon.

According to the statistical report on applicants and recipients of international protection, 71 out of 100 decisions were positive for granting refugee status, which is higher than the European Union average of 23 positive decisions.

“Portugal has shown very favorable dynamics in recent years, increasing the expression of refugee status in the total number of decisions taken, from eight refugee laws for every 100 decisions taken in 2019, to 18 out of 100 decisions in 2020, 45 out of 100 decisions in 2021 and 71 out of 100 decisions in 2022 is the highest weight ever,” the document says.

According to the report, the age distribution of applicants for protection in Portugal is “slightly different from the European Union average” with a lower relative importance of applicants under the age of 18 and a larger weight of applicants between the ages of 18 and 18. and 34 years old.

In 2022, applicants under the age of 14 accounted for only 11% of all asylum applications processed in the country.

The report, however, notes that Portugal is not among the top international protection destinations in the world or Europe.

“Of the 27.1 million refugees in the world counted by UNHCR in 2021, only 2.9 million (13.4%) were in the EU countries and of these refugees living in the EU27, Portugal accepted only about 2.7 thousand. , i.e. 0.1% of the total number of refugees in the EU-27,” notes ACM.

In 2021, Portugal ranked 20th among the 27 countries in the European Union that accepted the largest number of refugees, significantly behind the leader Germany, which in 2021 accepted 5.9% of the total number of refugees in the world, concentrating 43.9% of the refugees accepted. in the EU, i.e. 1.3 million people.

The report also highlights that at the European level, not all nationalities have the same degree of recognition of the need for international protection, which directly affects the number of favorable decisions each country receives each year.

In the European Union in 2022, the citizenship with the highest recognition rate for international protection requests was Syrian (94.2%), followed by Ukrainians (90.2%), Eritrean (85.3%), Afghanistan (85%) , Venezuela (76.3%), Mali (72%) and Somalia (61.5%).

“Comparing the overall results of the EU-27 with those of Portugal, it is found that the country, with the exception of requests from Afghan citizens (who have increased especially since 2021), received more requests for international protection from citizens with low recognition of the need for international protection,” says in the report.

According to the ACM, there has been an increase in the number of inadmissible applications in Portugal, i.e. persons who have applied for international protection in Portugal after applying for asylum in another member state, which “causes an immediate rejection”.

“In 2022, 343 requests (62.9%) were found to be inadmissible and were to be transferred to another Member State, an increase from the trend observed in 2021 (out of 443 rejected requests, 234 were inadmissible, representing 52.8%) “, the document says. .