In a move that diplomats and migration lawyers say will sharply curtail Colombian migrants’ access to asylum in Europe, the European Union (EU) this month adopted a common list of “safe countries of origin” that, for the first time, includes Colombia.
The administrative decision, combined with new fast-track asylum rules and sustained diplomatic pressure on Bogota, has effectively closed a legal avenue that tens of thousands of Colombians used in recent years to seek refuge in Europe, a development that critics say risks consigning vulnerable people to danger or to undocumented bureaucratic limbo.
The change is the culmination of a year-long campaign by European capitals alarmed by rising numbers of Colombians arriving visa-free and then applying for protection. Officials in Madrid, Berlin, and London warned Bogota that continued increases could jeopardize travel privileges; Brussels answered by moving Colombia into the same category as Morocco and Tunisia, where asylum claims are now routinely routed into expedited procedures and dismissed more quickly.
The decision was ratified by the EU Council on Dec. 8, 2025. European officials point to the statistics as justification for the new policy. Recognition rates for Colombian asylum seekers in the EU fell to roughly 5% in 2024, a figure Brussels has used to argue that the vast majority of those claims do not meet the Geneva Convention threshold for refugee status. That low rate, critics counter, is precisely why the new rules are so troubling: They use past denials to justify even faster denials in future cases, creating what advocates call a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The move to limit asylum access for Colombians also reflects broader international trends in migration policy. Across Europe, leaders such as Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni have pursued restrictive approaches, including emergency migration declarations and stringent border controls, that have shaped the EU debates on asylum reform and cooperation with transit countries.
At the same time, hard-line immigration enforcement and rhetoric from Washington under President Trump has reinforced a global political climate favoring control and deterrence over expanded asylum avenues. Similar themes have surfaced in Latin America, including Chile, where right-wing figures cite European models in proposing tighter migration controls, which promise to further increase with Jose Antonio Kast’s election.
Colombian migrants no longer have the right to remain in an EU member state with an appeal pending
Under the revised asylum procedures that accompany the “safe country” designation, nationals of countries with low recognition rates are funneled into accelerated processes. Those procedures shorten deadlines for evidence, limit time for legal counsel, and, critically, remove the automatic right to remain in a member state while an appeal is pending. In practice, applicants can be expelled while their case is still working its way through the courts, a change that lawyers say undercuts basic safeguards against refoulement.
The diplomatic mechanics were deliberate. The United Kingdom’s reimposition of a visa requirement for Colombians in November 2024, after only a few hundred asylum requests had been registered there, served as the first step toward harsher legislation, European diplomats said. Berlin then negotiated a migration partnership with Bogota that linked readmission agreements and deterrence measures to promises of expanded legal labor routes.
Spain, which received roughly four-fifths of Colombian asylum applications in recent years, quietly shifted policy and reworked national immigration law in ways that made asylum a less viable route to regularization. Those bilateral moves took pressure off Brussels to impose a blanket Schengen visa requirement, and produced instead the EU list, which accomplishes a similar result without curbing tourist travel.
New rules increase the risk that Colombian migrants with well-founded cases will be denied asylum in the bloc
Human rights organizations have accused the EU of substituting bureaucratic efficiency for humane adjudication. “Basing an expedited deportation regime on statistical averages and diplomatic convenience is a grave mistake,” said a spokesperson for Amnesty International in a joint statement with more than 50 civil society groups. The groups warned that the new rules increase the risk that people with well-founded individual claims will be returned to danger.
Their warnings are grounded in Colombia’s evolving security picture. Independent monitoring groups document a surge in violence in rural corridors where neither the state nor insurgent groups fully control territory. Drug-trafficking networks and dissident armed groups increasingly govern sections of Colombia’s countryside, committing assassinations, forced recruitment, and mass displacement. In 2025 alone, one monitoring group recorded more than 160 killings of social leaders and human-rights defenders, victims whose cases, rights groups say, rarely fit neatly into the narrow legal categories used by European asylum adjudicators.
One contested legal doctrine, the so-called Internal Flight Alternative, or IFA, has been pivotal in denying Colombian migrant claims in EU member states. European authorities routinely argue that someone threatened in a rural area could relocate safely to a city such as Bogota or Medellin and therefore does not require international protection. Critics reject that reasoning as detached from reality. Urban violence, lack of housing and employment, and the reach of criminal networks often make internal relocation impossible or excessively risky. Under the EU’s accelerated procedures, adjudicators are less likely to conduct the in-depth assessment necessary to disprove the IFA, lawyers say.
The EU’s new legislation could trigger two new forms of exclusion for Colombian migrants
The result, advocates warn, will be two parallel forms of exclusion. Mass administrative dismissal of asylum claims at the border, and a swelling of irregular migration inside Europe as refused applicants overstay or fall into illegal labor markets. European governments defend the reform as necessary and pragmatic.
Officials say the EU needed common tools to prevent so-called “secondary movements” within the bloc and to protect asylum systems already strained by multiple displacement crises. They also note that the new framework includes provisions for targeted protection of vulnerable groups, in theory, allowing exceptions for demonstrably at-risk Colombians.
But the legal basis of the list has already drawn criticism from within Europe’s own institutions. The EU’s highest court held in 2024 that a country can only be deemed “safe” if all of its territory meets the standard, a ruling that appears to conflict with the Commission’s decision to list Colombia despite documented, localized pockets of armed control. Civil-society coalitions and refugee organizations have signaled plans for legal challenges.
For Colombians at risk, the policy shift alters the calculus of leaving home. What was once a difficult but legally possible path to protection in Spain, Germany, or France may now be a race against a procedural clock, where an appeal no longer guarantees the right to stay.