EU announces deal to make it easier to deport asylum seekers to ‘safe third countries’

MADRID, December 18 (EUROPA PRESS) –

The Council of the European Union announced in the early hours of Wednesday a provisional agreement with the European Parliament to increase the cases of refusal of an asylum seeker, redefining the notion of “safe third country” to facilitate their expulsion to these countries.

“Today, the Danish Presidency of the Council of the European Union and European Parliament negotiators reached a provisional agreement on European Union legislation that revises the concept of a safe third country and expands the circumstances in which an asylum application can be rejected as inadmissible,” it announced in a statement published on its website after midnight.

Under the terms of the agreement, Member States will be able to apply in three cases the concept of “safe third country”, which allows an asylum application to be rejected without examining its content as inadmissible when the applicants could have sought and, if eligible, received international protection in a third country considered safe for them.

Thus, the legal argument could be invoked when “there is a link between the asylum seeker and the third country”, even if “this will no longer be a mandatory criterion”.

Likewise, this principle can apply when the person concerned “transited through the third country before arriving in the European Union” and when there is “an agreement or convention with a safe third country which guarantees that a person’s asylum application will be examined in the third country in question”.

However, the two entities agreed to maintain the position that the concept of safe third country cannot be invoked in the latter case when it comes to unaccompanied minors.

In the announcement, Danish Minister of Immigration and Integration Rasmus Stoklund celebrated having accepted this revision “in record time, allowing member states to reach agreements with safe third countries on the processing of asylum applications outside Europe.”

The agreement must now be confirmed by both institutions before its official adoption, scheduled for June 12, 2026, when the agreed changes “will be directly applicable in the Member States”.