EU asylum applications surge 85% in one year

The EU received 213,000 asylum applications from April to June this year, a jump of 85 percent from the same period in 2014, with over one-third coming from Syria or Afghanistan, official figures showed Friday.

Germany had the highest number of new applicants, with more than a third of the total for the EU, while Hungary was the country that received the most asylum applications relative to its population size, the EU’s Eurostat statistics agency said.

Applications from Kosovo, regarded as a “safe” country by most of the EU, dropped sharply in the period, from the top berth with 50,000 requests in the first quarter to just over 10,000 one quarter later.

Germany received 80,900 first time applicants in the second quarter of 2015, or 38% of the EU total, followed by Hungary on 32,700, or 15%.

Eurostat said Hungary processed 3,317 applicants per million inhabitants in the second quarter, more than triple the intake in Germany, with 997 requests per million.

Across the EU almost 600,000 applications were pending at the end of June, Eurostat said, with 52% of those being processed in Germany.