Egypt asylum shift deepens ‘Fortress Europe’ concerns

Egypt began implementing a new state-run asylum system on Friday, as rights groups warned that the move could deepen the EU’s reliance on Cairo to keep refugees and migrants away from Europe’s borders despite documented abuses.

Executive regulations for Egypt’s 2024 asylum law came into force on 21 August, beginning a transition that will transfer responsibility for registering asylum seekers and determining refugee status from the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) to a government committee under the authority of the prime minister.

The change comes as the EU increasingly relies on Egypt as a key partner in efforts to reduce irregular migration. 

his is part of a broader policy of shifting border management beyond Europe’s territory that critics have dubbed “Fortress Europe”.

Under a strategic partnership agreed in 2024, the EU pledged a €7.4 billion financial package to Egypt up to 2027, including €200 million specifically for migration and mobility.

The funding covers border management, efforts against smuggling and trafficking, returns and reintegration.

Rights groups have repeatedly warned, however, that European migration cooperation with Egypt risks supporting an increasingly securitised system in which refugees and migrants have faced arbitrary arrest, detention, torture, sexual violence and deportation.

Amnesty International documented in 2024 how Egyptian Border Guard Forces, whose capabilities had been supported under an earlier €80 million EU programme, carried out mass arrests of Sudanese refugees and forcibly returned hundreds to Sudan without allowing them to seek asylum or challenge their removal.

Crackdown on refugees

Those concerns have persisted as Egypt has expanded its crackdown on refugees and asylum seekers.

In February, Amnesty documented the arrests of 22 refugees and asylum seekers, including a child and two women, between late December 2025 and early February. Fifteen were registered with UNHCR.

Human Rights Watch reported in July that refugees and asylum seekers, primarily from Sudan and South Sudan, had been subjected to months of arbitrary arrest, detention and deportation, including people with valid UNHCR cards.

Some were being given appointments as late as 2028 to renew residency documents because of government backlogs, HRW said, while remaining vulnerable to arrest for failing to possess valid permits.

The organisation also documented overcrowded detention facilities, inadequate access to food and clean water, physical abuse and racial profiling of sub-Saharan African refugees.

Egyptian authorities do not publish comprehensive figures for refugee arrests or deportations. Egyptian rights organisations cited by Amnesty estimated that between 3,000 and 5,000 refugees and asylum seekers were deported in January and February alone.

More than 1.1 million people were registered with UNHCR in Egypt as of the end of May, up around 275 percent from before the outbreak of Sudan’s war in April 2023.

Around 852,000 were Sudanese, whose registered population in Egypt has increased by more than 1,300 percent since the war began. Syrians were the second-largest group, with around 98,000 registered.

The scale of Sudanese displacement has become central to Cairo’s argument that Egypt is carrying a heavy economic and social burden requiring greater international support.

Egypt takes control of asylum

But the new asylum regime will also give the Egyptian state significantly greater control over those displaced populations.

For more than seven decades, refugee-status determination in Egypt has been handled by UNHCR under a 1954 agreement. Under the new system, a Permanent Committee for Refugee Affairs will ultimately determine who is recognised as a refugee and who can remain in the country.

The transfer will not happen immediately, with the regulations providing for a transitional period in which existing files and data are handed over and UNHCR continues to play a role.

Refugees Platform in Egypt has nevertheless called for implementation to be suspended, warning before Friday’s deadline that there remained insufficient clarity over how responsibilities would be transferred and how international protection would be maintained.

The regulations also require people who entered Egypt irregularly to apply for asylum within 45 days, while rejected applicants can face removal.

Rights organisations have raised concerns over protections against refoulement, the forcible return of people to countries where they face persecution or serious harm, and the new committee’s broad powers on national security and public order.

For critics of European migration policy, Egypt’s transition illustrates a wider shift in which the EU increasingly seeks to manage migration before people reach its territory.

As Cairo assumes greater power to decide who receives protection and who does not, Europe is simultaneously investing heavily in Egypt’s capacity to manage and contain migration before it reaches the Mediterranean.