The first Humanitarian Corridors protocol agreement was signed in 2015 between the Community of Sant’Egidio and Federation of Evangelical Churches in Italy and the Ministries of the Interior and of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, for purposes of taking in 1,000 Syrian refugees from refugee camps in Lebanon. The agreement was renewed in November 2017, ensuring the arrival of 1,000 more people over the two-year period from 2018 to 2019, again most of them Syrian (see M. Ambrosini and I. Schnyder von Wartensee, “Actions Speak Louder than Claims: Humanitarian corridors, civil society, and asylum policies,” in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2022).
On 12 January 2017, Caritas Italiana and the Community of Sant’Egidio signed a new protocol agreement with the Italian government, opening the Humanitarian Corridors to 498 people from Eritrea and other countries in the Horn of Africa living as refugees in Ethiopia. The protocol was renewed in 2019 to take in 600 asylum seekers living in refugee camps in Niger and Jordan. The beneficiaries were always and exclusively selected on the basis of personal or familial vulnerability, with no discrimination on the basis of religion, sex, or age. The religious organizations worked with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) to select “vulnerable” people for the program.
According to data collected by the Community of Sant’Egidio, by 2022, 3,632 people had been resettled in Italy through the Humanitarian Corridors.
From 2017 to 2021, France, Belgium, and Andorra also opened Humanitarian Corridors for 532, 150, and 16 Syrians living in Lebanon, respectively. The religious organizations involved in those projects were the national branches of Caritas, the Community of Sant’Egidio, and the national federations of Protestant churches (“Corridori Umanitari per le Cifre,” Sant’Egidio, 2022).
Compared with the 4,330 Humanitarian Corridor beneficiaries resettled in the EU, however, it is important to remember the broader landscape of “illegal” migration into Europe. According to 2021 data published by the Pro Migrantes Foundation, by September of that year around 134,000 “illegal” entries were made. This number does not include the many people who died or were lost at sea attempting to reach Europe. While getting an accurate count is difficult because of so-called “ghost” shipwrecks, the Pro Migrantes Foundation estimates that, in 2021, 1,559 people died, many more than the 1,448 estimated dead in 2020.
Also not included in these numbers are the 28,600 people intercepted at sea by the Libyan Coast Guard and brought back to shore, as opposed to the approximately 56,700 migrants who landed in Italy and Malta (“Il Diritto d’Asilo: Report 2021, Sintesi,” Pro Migrantes Foundation, 2021). This data does not account for the phenomenon of ghost landings – vessels that reach the Italian coastline unnoticed by the authorities.
During the first semester of 2021, around 200,000 people requested asylum in the European Union, the same number who requested asylum in the first semester of 2020. In 2020 overall there were 417,000 asylum requests – a significant decline from the 631,000 made in 2019.
Germany received the highest number of asylum requests, around 102,500, followed by Spain, with about 86,000, France, with 82,000 and Greece, with 38,000. Italy was fifth for the number of asylum requests, with 21,200, despite being the entry point for the majority of people who cross the central Mediterranean.
The rate at which such requests are granted remained low in 2020, with 41% of the total receiving an affirmative response in the first instance, and 30% on appeal, although this was an increase from the 38% in the first instance and 31% on appeal in 2019.
In Italy, data compiled by Eurostat shows that asylum was granted in the first instance at a lower rate than the European average, with the local Italian commissions granting protection to only 28% of applicants. On appeal, however, Italy granted asylum in 40% of cases, a rate higher than that of the European average.