VILNIUS, August 13. /TASS/. All of the asylum applications filed by illegal migrants from Asian or African countries, who have crossed into Lithuania in recent months, have been refused, Evelina Gudzinskaite, Director of the Lithuanian Interior Ministry’s Migration Department, told reporters on Friday.
Gudzinskaite said that during the migration crisis her department had received a total of about 1,500 asylum claims which the migrants who crossed the border illegally, as a rule, immediately file with officials.
"Final decisions have been made on 200 applications. All the requests were rejected because no grounds for a positive decision were found," she said.
The migration department’s rulings may be appealed in court, but, as Gudzinskaite noted, the department offers illegals an alternative, which is their voluntary consent to return home that will be stimulated with a cash payment of 300 euros and plane tickets purchased by the Lithuanian government.
The process of returning those migrants home who agree voluntarily was launched in early August, but so far these are isolated cases. The first who decided to fly back home was a Cameroonian man deported from Lithuania on August 2. On Thursday, the first of the Iraqi illegal migrants was expelled. There are currently more than 4,000 illegals in Lithuania.
For comparison, according to the report of the European Asylum Support Authority, in the first half of this year, 47,231 asylum applications were registered in Germany, 32,212 - in France, and 25,823 - in Spain.