France Supplants U.S. as Top Haven for Asylum Seekers

France Supplants U.S. as Top Haven for Asylum Seekers, UN Says

March 1 (Bloomberg) -- France received 61,600 asylum seekers last year, supplanting the U.S. as the top destination country and leading the world for the first time in at least 20 years, the United Nations said.

The number of people who sought asylum in 38 industrialized nations fell to 368,000 in 2004, the fewest since 1988, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said in a 25-page report released today in Geneva. The report cited improving conditions in Afghanistan and Iraq for the decline.

The U.S., the top receiving country in 2003, fell to second place, with 52,400 people seeking legal protection. The U.K. dropped from second to third, with 40,200, and Germany, which was the leading destination in 13 of the past 20 years, was fourth with 35,600.

``It's more that the U.S. and Germany have fallen off than France gaining that much,'' UN spokesman Rupert Colville said. ``Also, France is getting more people from Turkey, China and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, while people fleeing Afghanistan and Iraq for the U.S. and U.K. have gone way down.''

Colville said France hasn't been the leading destination of asylums seekers since the early 1980s.

U.S. Invasion

The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan to topple the radical Islamic Taliban regime in 2001 caused the number of Afghans seeking asylum to decrease 83 percent in the past three years, to 8,800 from more than 50,000, the report said. The number of Iraqis seeking asylum has fallen 80 percent since 2002, to 9,894 after dictator Saddam Hussein was deposed last year.

``When Afghans saw things improving at home, they started going home in big numbers instead of traveling to Europe and beyond,'' Raymond Hall, head of the UN refugee agency's European bureau said in a statement.

The largest groups of asylum seekers in 2004 were from Russia (30,100), Serbia and Montenegro (22,300), China, (19,700), Turkey (16,200) and India (11,900).

The numbers of asylum seekers reached historic lows in the U.S. and much of Western Europe, the report said. Germany received the fewest immigrants since 1984, the U.S. and Switzerland the fewest since 1987, and the Netherlands the fewest since 1988.

``This really should reduce the pressure by politicians, media and the public to make asylum systems more and more restrictive to the point where many genuine refugees have enormous difficulty getting access to Europe,'' Hall said, ``In most industrialized countries it should simply not be possible to claim there is a huge asylum crisis any more.''

Cyprus, Finland, South Korea, Malta and Poland set records for asylum seekers last year, the UN said. As a percentage of population, Cyprus, Austria and Norway were the largest recipients of asylum requests in 2004