Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many asylum applications made by Syrian nationals in each of the last three years were refused on the grounds that the applicant could be returned to a safe third country.

In the last three years, the numbers of Syrian nationals (main applicants only) refused asylum on third country grounds were as follows:

26 in 2012

99 in 2013

66 in 2014

The Home Office publishes annual and quarterly data on asylum applications and initial decisions; this is available in Table as_01 (Asylum data tables Volume 1) of the quarterly Immigration Statistics release.

A copy of the latest release, Immigration Statistics April – June 2015, is available from https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/home-office/series/immigration-statistics-quarterly-release.