The European Union’s executive branch said that Bangladesh, Colombia, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, India, and Kosovo should be designated as “safe third countries.”
This would mean that applications by those countries’ citizens for international protection in Europe would be dealt with in three months, rather than the usual six.
More than 200,000 migrants from these countries applied for asylum across the 27-nation bloc last year.
In May 2024, the nations of the EU endorsed sweeping reforms to its crippled asylum system.
The rules were meant to resolve issues that have cleaved divisions between the member states for more than a decade, since more than 1 million migrants flooded the continent in 2015, amid wars in Syria and Iraq.
However, the new rules are not due to come into force until June 2026 at the earliest, and the commission is desperate to hurry along proceedings, including with swifter deportations, to ease pressure on migrant reception facilities and assuage public anger.
“Many Member States are facing a significant backlog of asylum applications, so anything we can do now to support faster asylum decisions is essential,” the EU’s migration commissioner, Magnus Brunner, said.
“The Pact provisions on recognition rates and applying the safe country of origin concept can help Member States deal with claims more quickly, whilst always ensuring that every asylum claim still receives an individual assessment and is subject to the scrutiny of national courts.”
Before it can come into force, the plan still needs to be endorsed by EU member states and the European Parliament.
Under it, asylum applications by people from countries that have themselves applied to join the bloc—Albania, Bosnia, Georgia, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Turkey—would also be fast-tracked.
In addition, EU states could speed up proceedings for people coming from countries where 20 percent or fewer applicants are granted international protection in Europe. The so-called recognition rate for the seven “safe third countries” mentioned is 5 percent or less.
Henna Virkkunen, EU executive vice president for tech sovereignty, security, and democracy, said: “Making asylum procedures faster and more efficient is a core objective of the Pact on Migration and Asylum, agreed last year. With today’s proposal, we want to advance the implementation of key provisions, equipping Member States with additional tools to streamline asylum processing.”
Some rights groups said that the concept of safe countries in asylum procedures “may lead to discrimination among refugees based on their country of nationality and detract from an individualized assessment,” Hussein Baoumi, a foreign policy specialist at Amnesty International in Brussels, said.
“The EU must ensure that groups at specific risk in each country, for example, political opponents, LGBTI individuals, journalists, and human rights defenders, are clarified, while also enhancing engagement with listed countries to address human rights concerns,” he said.
Many nations moved to introduce stricter controls and tougher policies in recent years, with Poland introducing tighter restrictions on asylum for those entering via its eastern border, while Germany recommenced deportations to Afghanistan and Syria following a spate of violent attacks by illegal immigrants.
