According to calculations by the Baden-Württemberg Refugee Council, the protection rate for refugees seeking asylum in Germany has fallen from 59.3 percent in 2024 to 37.5 percent in 2025. The organization reported this in a press release dated February 4, 2026. The decline was particularly pronounced for refugees from Syria: while the protection rate was still 100 percent in 2024, it fell to 5.3 percent in 2025 after the fall of the Assad regime. The protection rate for people from Afghanistan is still relatively high at 78.9 percent. This can be explained by a decision of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), according to which women and girls from Afghanistan are considered a persecuted social group and are therefore entitled to asylum (tünews INTERNATIONAL reported: tun24062607). In 2025, many affected women and girls who did not yet have full refugee protection in Germany therefore submitted a follow-up asylum application in order to obtain refugee status. In contrast, the protection rate for men from Afghanistan is only around 30 percent. Particularly high protection rates of over 80 percent are recorded for refugees from Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan, and the Palestinian territories in Israel.
The statistics of the Refugee Council of Baden-Württemberg are based on so-called “adjusted protection rates,” which means that only asylum applications that have been examined in terms of content are taken into account, and not the total number of asylum applications submitted. This means that “Dublin cases,” withdrawn applications, or asylum applications that were rejected for formal reasons and were therefore not subject to substantive examination are not taken into account.
High confirmation of protection status in revocation proceedings
The Refugee Council also referred to the German government’s response to a minor interpellation by the Left Party in the Bundestag on January 22, 2026, according to which, in a total of 23,101 revocation or withdrawal reviews, protection status was confirmed in 93 percent of cases, and in as many as 96.7 percent of cases involving Syrians.
To the report by the Refugee Council of Baden-Württemberg: Protection rate for refugees in Germany declines – Refugee Council of Baden-Württemberg
To the overview table: Protection rates adjusted for 2025.pdf
Bundestag, printed paper 21/3780 dated January 22, 2026: Supplementary information on asylum statistics for the year 2025 – Key issues relating to revocation proceedings: Printed paper 21/3780
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