TWO NEW COUNTRIES – Algeria and Botswana – are expected to be added to the “safe country of origin” list, amid other proposed reforms to Ireland’s International Protection system.
Justice Minister Helen McEntee has said the move is not meant to deter genuine asylum applicants but to make the process more efficient and to discourage people from using Ireland’s asylum system as a route for economic migration.
Tánaiste and Foreign Affairs Minister Micheál Martin has commented in recent days that the list gets reviewed on an ongoing basis and that countries were added to it last year.
In the wake of the Government’s announcement, the Irish Refugee Council has noted that a person from a country designated as ‘safe’ may still be recognised as a refugee and granted asylum in Ireland.
McEntee gave an interview on RTÉ’s This Week programme on Sunday where she initially announced that she would make a decision on adding to the safe countries list – calling it a ‘crackdown’ on people wrongfully entering the asylum system.
However, for months before these recent announcements, debates in the media, online and in the Dáil have featured arguments about applicants from “safe countries of origin”.
These often include misleading claims that all asylum seekers from these countries should be automatically rejected, that migrants from these countries make up the majority of immigration or International Protection cases, or that authorities in Ireland or the EU are unaware of these designations and are being duped.
In December, Deputy Carol Nolan of the Rural Independent group introduced a motion on immigration, that repeatedly mentioned the term “safe country of origin”.
This included calling on the government to “ensure a much higher bar” for International Protection applicants coming from these countries, and to “explain why unvetted single males, many from safe countries, are being accommodated in accommodation centres in small rural locations without any consultation whatsoever with local communities”.
On social media, claims about asylum seekers from “safe countries” are often put in far starker terms.
“In a normal, functioning immigration system this should mean that people from these countries would automatically be rejected asylum on arrival and returned to their country of origin. Or one would’ve reasonably thought this to be the case, but not in little, old, ever weirder Ireland,” one comment on Reddit reads.
Other posts on social media sites, particularly X.com, formerly known as Twitter, have explicitly said that named individuals from “safe countries” should be automatically deported.
The concept of “safe country of origin” is explicitly outlined in EU law as one where “on the basis of the legal situation, the application of the law within a democratic system and the general political circumstances, it can be shown that there is generally and consistently no persecution [...], no torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and no threat by reason of indiscriminate violence in situations of international or internal armed conflict“.
However while a plan on having a common list of safe countries was discussed by EU policymakers, this was never established and the proposal has since been formally withdrawn.
Currently, it’s up to individual countries to determine which countries should be considered safe.
A 2021 EU report by the EU’s Asylum Support Office (EASO, since renamed to the European Union Agency for Asylum), shows that, among the EU countries that had such lists, there was little consensus on what was considered a “safe country”.
While countries like Australia, Canada, Ghana, and Senegal featured on many other EU countries’ lists, they did not feature in Ireland’s at the time. Conversely, Ireland was unusual in considering South Africa a safe country – the only other EU country to do so was Slovakia.
The EASO report also explains that even within individual countries’ lists, there are subrules and exceptions. For example, some countries that considered Georgia safe noted that this designation should not apply for people from the Russian-occupied Georgian territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Hungary had designated the United States as a safe country – except for states that apply the death penalty.
Some countries also do not designate countries as safe for specific groups of people who flee, such as women, LGBTI people, or members of certain ethnicities and religions.
In short, there is no international standard for what countries are considered safe but rather a diverse set of lists, each with their own subclauses and exceptions.
Furthermore, these lists are not static, and countries get added and removed from different lists continually.
The International Protection Act 2015 defines safe countries of origin in Irish law.
Section 72 defines our criteria for considering a country as safe – using almost the exact same wording as the EU legislation – if it can be shown “there is generally and consistently no persecution, no torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and no threat by reason of indiscriminate violence in situations of international or internal armed conflict.”
Currently Ireland considers the following safe countries of origin:
(The list is not intended to be comprehensive, and other countries that would be considered safe – for example, Canada – were likely not considered due to a lack of asylum claims).
The act does not make applicants from the countries listed as safe inadmissible for asylum.
Rather than disqualifying an applicant, being from a safe country of origin is just one factor to be included in reports that are prepared for the Minister for Justice.
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has ruled that a designation of safe country of origin “cannot establish an absolute guarantee of safety for nationals of that country.
“By its very nature, the assessment underlying the designation can only take into account the general civil, legal and political circumstances in that country and whether actors of persecution, torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment are subject to sanction in practice when found liable in that country.
“For that reason, it is important that, where an applicant shows that there are valid reasons to consider the country not to be safe in his or her particular circumstances, the designation of the country as safe can no longer be considered relevant for him or her.”
The ruling was given in the wake of a case where a Serbian national said he had fled to Sweden after being attacked and threatened by an illegal paramilitary group. In Serbia, he had been placed into prison as part of a witness protection programme.
According to the International Protection Office, which is responsible for examining and processing applications for international protection in Ireland: “All applications for international protection are examined fully and individually on their merits, including those from countries which are designated as safe countries of origin”.
However, since November 2022, applicants from a designated safe country of origin are fast-tracked through the Irish International Protection process and “receive their interview date on the day they apply for international protection reducing their waiting time for an interview to a matter of weeks,” the Department of Justice has said.
An Oireachtas committee on integration and refugee issues was told that applicants under this fast-track system would receive a decision in less than three months, compared with an average of 22-26 months in 2022.
Figures provided by the Department of Justice bear out the speediness of these applications: while the median wait time for a first interview was 59 weeks in December, for accelerated cases this was only 5 weeks.
For the full processing of an application, it took 75 weeks for standard cases, but only 11 weeks for those undergoing the accelerated procedure.
If an asylum request is denied, an applicant may make one appeal. However this process is also accelerated.
In a Frequently Asked Questions document, the IPO confirms that these accelerated procedures will otherwise function the same as the regular asylum process. “The only difference is that a person from a safe country can have their case dealt with in a more timely manner,” they say.
However, The Dublin Inquirer reported last year that some Georgian asylum seekers said that they did not have enough time to arrange legal representation before their asylum interview and the The Irish Refugee Council has said the fast-tracked system removed “the possibility of practically accessing legal advice before a person completes their initial questionnaire”.
In 2023, total asylum claims were down 2.7% compared with the previous year.
International Protection (IP) figures released in December showed that there were 13,277 new asylum seeker applicants in 2023, and 18,314 cases were still pending at the end of the year.
The countries that the highest number of IP applicants were from were Nigeria (2,084, or 15.7% of the total); Algeria (1,462); Afghanistan (1,106); and Somalia (1,098). None of those four countries is designated “safe”, though Algeria will be added to the list this week, the government has said.
Department of Justice statistics shared with The Journal show that only 1,766, or about 13% of the total applicants, were from safe countries – 1,065 of these applicants, the majority, were from Georgia, making it the fifth highest country for asylum seekers to come from last year.
This is a significant drop from 2022, when 2,710 people from Georgia claimed asylum – making it the single biggest county for people to claim asylum from, making up almost 20% of all claims that year.
McEntee cited Georgia on RTÉ Radio last Sunday as a country whose applicants have dropped significantly since the introduction of a fast-tracked asylum process for safe countries.
But what about the other countries on the safe list?
South Africa is the next highest country on the list for people fleeing to Ireland to seek asylum, with 492 applicants in 2023.
Albania, which is also regularly mentioned in conversations about safe countries – almost as much as Georgia – was the country of origin for just 168 International Protection applicants last year – about 1.2% of the total.
Kosovo had only 41 applicants.
Other countries simply don’t have significant numbers of applicants coming from them. Bosnia & Herzegovina; Montenegro; Serbia; and North Macedonia have never had more than five people fleeing from them to seek asylum in Ireland in a given year from 2021 to 2023.
Yes. While countries that are designated safe might provide protection from persecution, torture, and active conflict as a general rule, that does not mean that there are no instances of people fleeing legitimate dangers.
Regions in Georgia are occupied by Russia and democracy is backsliding in its territory that remains independent, according to US-based research group Freedom House.
“Oligarchic influence affects the country’s political affairs, policy decisions, and media environment, and the rule of law is undermined by politicization,” its website reads. “Civil liberties are inconsistently protected.”
Among the difficulties in South Africa listed by Human Rights Watch, are: “Women and members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex (LGBTI) community continue to face abuses, including murder, assault, and harassment.”
Between 2021 and 2023, a total of 3,246 final decisions were made on applicants from safe countries, according to data from the Department of Justice shared with The Journal.
Of these, according to the official data, around 980 of these cases (about 30%) resulted in an outright refusal – though the proportion of refusals appeared to be far higher for Albania and Georgia than the other countries listed.
In 2023, 16 Albanians were granted refugee status, and 87 were granted permission to remain. 194 had their claims rejected entirely.
That same year, 184 Georgians were granted refugee status; 11 were granted subsidiary protection (read more about these categories here); and 187 were granted permission to remain.
403 Georgian applicants, a majority, had their claims rejected entirely.
In comparison, most claims for applicants from South Africa and Kosovo were found to have merit – though this is boosted by 342 South Africans who were granted a right to remain in 2022 which the department says “reflects the operation of the regularisation of the undocumented scheme and relate to cases that were in the process a number of years”.
So, while a proportion of asylum claimants from “safe countries” have been rejected, a significant amount were found to be fleeing real harm, even though the countries they were fleeing are, for most people, designated as being safe.
The Journal FactCheck is a signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles. You can read it here. For information on how FactCheck works, what the verdicts mean, and how you can take part, check out our Reader’s Guide here. You can read about the team of editors and reporters who work on the factchecks here.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say