Frontex has sent to the Bosnian authorities a report saying that 6,522 citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina sought asylum in the EU last year, an increase of 54 per cent compared with 2013, the Sarajevo daily Dnevni Avaz said on Monday.
In 2014, 43,000 people from the Western Balkans region applied for asylum in the EU, which was 50 per cent more than in 2013. Most of the applications were filed by citizens of Serbia, namely 19,000.
Frontex also recorded a considerable increase in the number of asylum seekers from Albania. With 10,000 applications submitted in 2014, Albania now ranks as the country with the second largest number of migrants seeking asylum in the European Union. It previously ranked fourth.
All reported cases concerned people who applied for asylum to improve their financial situation because in some EU countries asylum seekers are entitled to a monthly allowance which is often several times the monthly income they receive in their country of origin.
Commenting on the Frontex report, Bakir Dautbasic, secretary of the Bosnian Ministry of Security, said that as many as 5,640 asylum seekers from Bosnia and Herzegovina had submitted applications in Germany, which has in the meantime tightened the criteria for granting asylum. "After these liberal asylum criteria have been removed, it can be expected that the number of false asylum seekers from Bosnia and Herzegovina will decrease," he said.