Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many inadmissibility decisions based on the concept of safe third country were made by the UK in 2019, by country designated as safe third country.

The Dublin III Regulation is a long-standing mechanism between EU Member States to determine responsibility for examining asylum claims. It is not an application route for transfer to the UK. At present we do not publish data on cases covered by the Dublin Regulation. Eurostat, the EU’s statistics agency, regularly publishes Member State figures, which can be found at: http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=migr_dubto&lang=en

The UK is committed to providing protection to those who need it, in accordance with its international obligations. It is an established principle that those in need of protection should seek asylum in the first safe country that they enter and not put their lives at risk by making unnecessary and dangerous onwards journeys to the UK. Illegal migration from safe countries undermines our efforts to help those most in need. Controlled resettlement via safe and legal routes is the best way to protect refugees and disrupt the organised crime groups that exploit migrants and refugees.

Information regarding how many inadmissible decisions based on the concept of safe third country and which designated safe third country those decisions relate to is not recorded or held in a reportable format.

Full guidance on which asylum claims must be treated as inadmissible was published in October 2019 and can be found via the link below:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/inadmissibility-third-country-cases