In France, asylum seekers who do not speak French - or who don’t speak it well enough - must use interpreters to tell their story at Ofpra (French Office for Protection for Refugees and Stateless people) or the CNDA (France's National Court of Asylum). Interpreting requires rigor and neutrality. However, in practice, and despite the importance of the issue, translation errors do occur.
There's been a sharp drop in migrant arrivals in Italy by sea this year, according to the Italian interior minister. There's also been a drop in asylum requests in the Southern European country.
The number of applications for asylum in the EU is back up. About 206,500 applications were submitted during the first four months of 2019, compared with 179,000 in 2018, according to the European Asylum Support Office.
Two Afghan families were forced to leave Hungary and return to Serbia this week after their asylum claims were rejected. The chief of the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, has spoken out about the expulsion of the Afghans - among them a pregnant woman - calling it "a serious violation of international law."
According to the European Union's statistics agency, more than 300,000 people were granted asylum within the bloc in 2018, a drop of nearly 40 percent compared to 2017. Almost 30 percent of beneficiaries were Syrians.
The German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer is planning a new law to manage migration which is expected to be passed by the German cabinet in April 2019. The new law will seek to get tough on asylum seekers who lied about, or tried to obscure, their real identities in the hope of obtaining asylum.
The number of first-time asylum applications in the European Union has fallen to 580,845, Eurostat has reported. At the height of the migrant movements into Europe in 2015, asylum applications exceeded 1.2 million.
Have thousands of war criminals sought asylum in Germany in recent years? A newspaper report alleges authorities failed to investigate a large amount of leads they received at the height of the refugee crisis.
The processing time for asylum applications in Germany has dropped to six months on average, the German government said. Opposition party The Left criticized the duration of the procedures, which the government had intended to take no longer than three months.
The German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees noted in its latest statistics that there was a significant rise in the numbers of people seeking asylum in Germany from the Americas in 2018.
Germany's refugee office could be given four years instead of three to recheck asylum approvals. The government has also paved the way for a new law to better facilitate the exchange of asylum seekers' data.
The Dutch coalition government has agreed a compromise deal granting asylum to several hundred young migrants who have been in the Netherlands for at least five years. The deal reached late on Tuesday enabled the government to avoid a political crisis.