On the proposal of Minister of Foreign Affairs Hadja Lahbib and Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration Nicole de Moor, the Council of Ministers approved a draft royal decree establishing the list of safe countries of origin, now including Moldova.

On 18 March 2024, the Belgian Presidency of the Council of the European Union, the Office of the Commissioner General for Refugees and Stateless Persons (CGVS) and the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) co-organized a conference during which participants reiterated the need for greater convergence between Member States to achieve a fair and efficient asylum system.

In a judgement released today in case C-222/22, the Court of Justice of the European Union held that the Qualification Directive does not permit a presumption that any subsequent application based on circumstances which the applicant has created by his or her own decision since leaving the country of origin stems from abusive intent and abuse of the procedure for the grant of international protection. Any subsequent application must be assessed on an individual basis.

The Office of the Commissioner General for Refugees and Stateless Persons (CGRS) announced today that it would resume the processing of Sudanese cases from Darfur, Kordofan, Blue Nile and Khartoum as of 26 February 2024.

In 2023, 287 refugees were resettled in Belgium, including 154 Congolese from Rwanda, 81 Syrians from Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, and 26 Sudanese, 18 Ethiopians and 8 Eritreans from Egypt. 

The Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration announced today that applications from nationalities that have very little chance of obtaining international protection, in particular Congolese, Moldovans and Georgians, will be processed in a fast-track procedure from 1 February.

In a press release published today, the UN Refugee Agency called on Belgium and Hungary to use their 2024 European Union (EU) Presidencies as an opportunity to finalize the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum and to ensure its protection-sensitive implementation.

While in the past, Somali applicants from southern and central Somalia, with the exception of Mogadishu, were generally granted subsidiary protection status because of the security situation, the Office of the Commissioner General for Refugees and Stateless Persons (CGVS) now concludes that no region in Somalia is characterized by an exceptional situation in which the degree of indiscriminate violence is so high that it reaches the "real risk" threshold leading per se to the granting of subsidiary protection.