Serbia Struggles to Process Refugees’ Asylum Claims

Serbia has granted only two asylum requests out of more than 150 applications submitted in 2017, and the National Office for Asylum is backed up with hundreds more cases, mostly due to lack of staff, reported Balkan Insight. 

"The number [of requests] they processed is extremely small compared to last year. They did much fewer because they are backed up," said Nikola Kovacevic from the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights.

Kovacevic told BIRN that one Afghan and one Syrian citizen were granted asylum in July and August, respectively.

According to the National Office for Asylum’s statistics, obtained by the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights, not a single asylum request was granted out of 151 filed in the first six months of 2017, while 28 people were denied asylum.

In 2016, the total number of applications was 574, of which 105 were denied and only 19 were accepted.

The other 450 cases from last year haven't been processed yet.

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