05/31/2023 08:00 (act. 05/31/2023 09:09)
In 2022, more than 1,000 travel home certificates were issued. ©APA/HELMUT FOHRINGER (symbol image)
In the previous year, 1,005 exit certificates for asylum seekers were successfully issued in Austria.
253 attempts in the respective countries of origin were negative, shows a response from the Ministry of the Interior to liberal security spokesman Hannes Amesbauer. Most of the requested certificates turned out to be superfluous because the asylum seekers had traveled to other countries.
Home travel certificates are issued by the respective embassy
Issuance of certificates by the respective embassy is a prerequisite for being able to return rejected asylum seekers to their countries of origin without a passport. For example, Pakistan has refused to accept refugees 72 times. In Nigeria, this was the case in 55 cases. These refugees have a tolerated status in Austria but cannot work, for example.
Some states do not cooperate with Austria – like Iran, which does the same with the entire EU. There is also no corresponding agreement with Somalia, for example.
Most home travel certificates with Tunisia
Tunisia received the highest number of exit certificate applications last year, followed by Pakistan and Morocco. In total, there were almost 5,200. The large discrepancy with regard to the total number of successfully issued applications and negatively determined results from the fact that many refugees left the country of their own accord because they did not have Austria as their destination country when they were detained, especially Indians and Tunisians.
Basically, the statistics show that exit certificates are back to the values of the time before the great corona crisis. In 2019 there were a good 5,600 claims, in the years since significantly less, in 2020 and 2021 around 4,000. At least the number of bounces has gone down. In 2019, there were still 712, i.e. significantly higher than the previous year with a similar number of applications.
In total, there were 12,550 departures in 2022, nearly two-thirds of them voluntary, including returning displaced people from Ukraine.