EUAA Report Counts 37% Drop in Portugal Asylum Requests in 2025 — 1,763 Filings Place Country at 0.2% of EU+ Total

The European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) released its 2025 country tape on Tuesday morning, putting Portugal's annual asylum requests at 1,763 — a 37% drop on the 2,797 lodged in 2024 and a continuation of a multi-year retreat. The figure leaves Portugal carrying just 0.2% of the 822,000 first-time requests filed across the EU+ universe of 27 member states and four Schengen-associated countries.

Colombia led the 2025 origin table for Portugal at 14% of filings, followed by China at 10% and Angola at 9%. The mix reflects long-standing migration corridors — Colombian asylum claims have been climbing across the EU since 2022 as Lusophone-receiving states absorb part of the displaced flow, while Angolan requests pivot on the post-2017 wave of political asylum cases that AIMA (Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo — Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum) has been processing through CNAR, the agency's National Centre for Asylum and Refugees.

The granular numbers behind the headline drop sketch a system that is shrinking on the intake side but congesting at the decision desk. First-instance decisions came in at 488 in 2025, down 24% from 641 the year prior. Of those decisions, 288 were positive grants — Afghan applicants captured 42% of the granted protection, Syrians 13% and Eritreans 5%. Rejections fell hardest, dropping 69% to 134 — a signal that CNAR is closing fewer files outright, not that more applicants are being approved in absolute terms.

The bottleneck shows in the pending stack. As of December 2025 there were 8,730 cases awaiting first-instance ruling, 94% above the 4,510 figure for December 2024. The doubling lands on top of the 525,000-plus residence-permit backlog that AIMA's mission structure has been processing since 2024, and on top of the 643 complaints AIMA received in the January–April 2026 window — 41.3% citing slow permit processing — that the agency disclosed earlier this week.

The EUAA flagged one outstanding institutional gap: Portugal "has not yet transposed the amendments to legislation on activating the Migration and Asylum Pact," and no draft law had been published as of the report's compilation date. The Pact — the EU instrument that takes effect across the bloc in June 2026 — overhauls procedure timelines, screening at external borders, and the solidarity mechanism that distributes asylum responsibility between member states. Member states that miss transposition face Commission infringement risk and, more practically, find their national procedures out of step with the bloc-wide harmonised flow.

For foreign residents who arrived through humanitarian or family-reunification channels, the takeaway is mixed. The narrower intake pipeline means CNAR is fielding fewer fresh applicants per quarter, which in theory frees decision-room capacity. The doubled pending pile says the opposite is happening in practice. The Pact transposition — when Parliament eventually moves it — will redraw deadlines and appeal routes, and any in-flight case at that moment is likely to be re-anchored to the new procedural clock.

The EUAA's full 2025 annual report — the Asylum Report 2026 — lands later this month and will set Portugal's metrics against the bloc-wide pattern: requests across the EU+ fell roughly a fifth in 2025 to 822,000, the steepest drop since the 2017 post-Syria normalisation cycle.