The arrival of asylum seekers has reduced significantly, falling to the level of 2014, said the Finnish Immigration Services (Migri).

A total of 3,560 asylum applications had been submitted by the end of August this year, compared to 3,651 applications submitted in 2014, said a press release.

In 2015, a total of 32,476 persons applied for asylum in Finland. The majority of them arrived in the autumn. Most of them were young Sunni Arab men from the Baghdad region in Iraq. The asylum-seekers’ profiles differed slightly from the profiles in Sweden and Norway, as in these countries a large share of the asylum seekers were Iraqi families with children. Many Iraqi asylum seekers who arrived in 2015 withdrew their applications in the autumn of 2015.

Between January 1, 2015 and August 31, 2017, a total of 36,988 asylum interviews were conducted and 42,822 decisions were made.

The majority of asylum seekers who arrived in Finland in 2015 received the first decision on their applications in 2016. Some have had to wait for a decision until this autumn because of the backlog of applications. As of September 2017, approximately 600 asylum seekers who arrived in 2015 were still waiting for a decision. Decisions on the final applications remaining from 2015 will be made by the end of October 2017.

By the end of July 2017, Administrative Courts had processed 4,076 appeals against decisions made by the Migri. The courts rejected 72.3 per cent of the appeals, thus confirming the decisions made by the Migri.

Compared to earlier years, the Administrative Courts returned an unusually high number of decisions because the applicants have provided new information. If an applicant provides new information while his or her appeal is being processed by an Administrative Court, the court returns the matter directly to the Finnish Immigration Service.

Almost 70 per cent of the decisions returned for this reason were submitted by Iraqis or Afghans and the asylum seekers in question provided new information about their situation by stating that they had converted to Christianity.