Besides the newsrelease there are also two Statistics Explained articles "Asylum statistics" and "Asylum quarterly" . These reports analyse the annual and quarterly trends on first time asylum applicants and first instance decisions on asylum applications in year 2015 and in the fourth quarter of 2015 respectively.

Some key messages in the data, from all reports:

2015 reference period:

• Record number of over 1.2 million first time asylum seekers in 2015 in the EU
• Syrians, Afghanis and Iraqis the 3 main citizenships of asylum seekers in 2015
• The number of Syrians has doubled in 2015 to reach 362 800 compared with 2014
• The number of Afghans has almost quadrupled to 178 200 and that of Iraqis has multiplied by 7 to 121 500 in 2015 compared with 2014
• More than a third applied for asylum in Germany in 2015
• Highest number of first time applicants relative to the population in Hungary and Sweden in 2015
• Almost a million asylum applications pending at the end of 2015

Fourth quarter of 2015:

• 426 000 asylum applicants in the EU-28 in the fourth quarter of 2015, or 130% more compared with the same quarter of 2014
• In Finland and Norway asylum applicants increased 13 and 7 times more respectively, compared with fourth quarter of 2014
• 198 600 first instance decisions were made in the EU Member States during the fourth quarter of 2015, nearly 60% of them were positive
• Syrians were the main recipients of protection statuses, followed by Eritreans and Iraqis

An interactive Infographic on asylum applications in 2015 is also available on the Eurostat website.