On Thursday the negotiating team of the Civil Liberties Committee informally agreed with the Council new rules under which member states may decide that a non-EU country is a safe third country (STC) with respect to an asylum applicant who is not a national of that country, and may therefore declare their application inadmissible. The deal builds on a proposal by the Commission to update this provision in the Asylum Procedure Regulation.

The new rules would allow EU countries to apply the STC concept in individual cases where one of these three conditions is met:

• there is a connection between the applicant and a third country; this connection may be considered established if members of the applicant’s family are present in the third country concerned, if the applicant stayed there previously, or if there are linguistic, cultural or similar links.
• applicants have transited through a third country on the way to the Union, where they could have requested effective
• where an…