Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, for what reasons the rates of approval for asylum claims made by people from Albania are different in the UK to those of other countries in Europe.

Other countries in Europe have legal migration routes that may impact the number of asylum claims lodged and subsequently granted. For example, Germany pursued a Western Balkan strategy which included issuing of 250,000 work visas from 2016-2020 and subsequently saw a 90% reduction in total asylum claims from the region across 2015-2017, from 120,882 first time applications in 2015 to 10,915 in 2017. Asylum grant rates can fluctuate for a number of different reasons, for example prioritisation of certain case types, including those more vulnerable for safeguarding or health-related reasons, and changes in country situations. Within a nationality, the grant rate can also vary. For example, despite the overall grant rate for Albanians in the year ending September 2022 being 51%, for Albanian adult men the grant rate was 13% and for Albanian women and children it was 88% (How many people do we grant protection to? - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)).

The domestic UK case law of TD and AD (Trafficked women) CG [2016] UKUT 92 (IAC) sets out the current approach to assess asylum claims from Albanian females who claim to be a victim of trafficking. It details the likelihood of risk on return, vulnerability factors that must be taken into account, and whether there is sufficiency of protection in Albania. Other European countries are not bound by this, or any other UK case law.