How (un)restrictive are we?

Abstract

This study applies statistical techniques to improve the comparability of countries’ overall recognition rates. Firstly, it presents adjusted recognition rates for 2014. The adjusted rate is the percentage of positive decisions in a country if international differences in the composition of the asylum-seeker population with respect to country of citizenship, age, and sex—other characteristics are not available via Eurostat—are held statistically constant. Secondly, it presents expected recognition rates for 2014. The expected recognition rate gives the percentage of positive decisions in a country if each asylum applicant in that country would have had exactly that probability of a positive decision that he or she had on average in 2014 in the EU/EFTA area as a whole based on his or her nationality, age, and sex (i.e. under a kind of ‘statistical European norm’). Finally, it was examined whether international differences in the probability of a positive first-instance decision are annulled at later stages of asylum procedures due to appeals, and whether countries with high recognition rates tend to receive relatively few asylum seekers.