More than one million people who sought asylum in Europe in 2015 and 2016 still haven’t received a decision and just 3 percent of the total refugee population have returned to their home countries, according to a Pew Research Center study released Wednesday.
Pew claims some 2,205,000 asylum seekers arrived in the European Union, Norway and Switzerland in 2015 and 2016. By the end of last year, just half had received a verdict on the applications and around 40 percent were approved.
Just 75,000 people have returned to their home countries, either voluntarily or through deportation. The current location of 100,000 rejected applicants is unknown, according to the study. They are neither believed to have returned home nor appealed their rejections.
Germany is by far the most popular country with more than 45 percent of applications. The situation has stretched the German court system due to an ever expanding number of appeals. Figures released Monday by newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung shows a backlog of some 283,000 appeals by the end of July. The figure is almost double the 175,000 from the entire year of 2016. (RELATED: German Court System Can’t Cop With Dramatic Increase In Asylum Appeals)
Robert Seegmüller, the chair of the Association of German Administrative Law Judges, recently warned that “everything will collapse” unless the court system figures out a way to deal with the rapidly increasing number of cases.
“The situation is dramatic for administrative courts,” Seegmüller told German news outlet Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland (RND) in July, according to The Local. “We are now completely stretched to our limits.”
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