• United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

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19 October 2011This report summarizes patterns and trends in the number of individual asylum claims submitted in Europe and selected non-European countries during the first six months of 2011.

The data in this report are based on information available as of 14 September 2011, unless otherwise indicated. It covers the 38 European and six non-European States that currently provide monthly asylum statistics to UNHCR. Figures are mostly based on official asylum statistics, reflecting national laws and procedures.

The group of countries analysed in this report is collectively referred to as “the 44 industrialized countries” and has been defined for the purpose of this report only. The 44 countries are: 27 Member States of the European Union, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Montenegro, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland, The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and Turkey, as well as Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea and the United States of America. The group of 44 countries received an estimated 198,300 asylum applications in the first half of 2011.

The numbers in this report reflect claims made for first instance asylum procedures only. The report does not include data on applications on appeal or review, and it does not provide information on the outcome of asylum procedures or on the admission of refugees through resettlement programmes. This information is available in other UNHCR reports.

To the extent possible, the statistics presented in this document reflect the number of individuals lodging an asylum application for the first time. However, this may not reflect the actual number of new asylum-seekers, as some of the figures quoted may include repeat applications, including applications made by persons in more than one country during the same year.

All data refer to the number of individuals, with the exception of asylum-seekers in the United States of America where only the number of cases (which may include several individuals) is available for applications submitted to the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Applications submitted to the United States Department of Justice, Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) are, however, recorded as individuals. To allow comparability with other countries of asylum, UNHCR uses a figure of 1.4 individuals per case to estimate the number of people reported by DHS because historical data suggest that, on average, one asylum case contains 1.4 individuals. In the country of origin tables, figures for the United States of America are a combination of the number of cases (DHS) and the number of individuals (EOIR), owing to the large variation in case size by nationality.

All figures in this report should be considered as provisional and subject to change. Due to retroactive changes and adjustments, some of the data included in this publication may differ slightly from that reported in previous UNHCR documents, or from the official figures published by States.