Finland said this week that it is preparing to resume transfers of asylum seekers to Italy, becoming the fourth country after Germany, Switzerland and Austria to do so. Its Interior Ministry told the Italian news agency ANSA that EU rules assigning responsibility for asylum applications must be implemented as intended.
Sweden has also confirmed that its own transfers are continuing, arguing that Europe’s migration system depends on cooperation working properly. Both moves add fresh pressure to a system that has functioned only on paper for much of the past three years.
Transfers Resume Across Northern Europe
These transfers concern people whose asylum claims fall under rules assigning responsibility to whichever member state they first entered, regardless of where they later settled. The scale of the gap between rules and practice is stark.
Italian Dublin Unit data compiled by the Asylum Information Database show Italy received 19,889 incoming transfer requests in 2025. Only 132 of those requests actually resulted in a completed transfer.
Italy itself sent 8,502 outgoing requests to other member states that same year, producing only 22 completed transfers. The shortfall runs in both directions almost equally.
Similar pressure has built in Greece, where governments facing large numbers of external-border arrivals argue that responsibility cannot remain concentrated in a handful of states.
Italy Pushes Back on the Rules
Rome suspended most incoming Dublin transfers in late 2022, citing pressure on reception facilities. The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled this March that a member state cannot simply free itself from Dublin responsibilities through a unilateral announcement.
That judgment does not create accommodation places on its own. Italian authorities have told researchers that the reception system has no beds specifically reserved for Dublin returnees.
Germany says bilateral agreements reached with Italy and Greece in autumn 2025 provided for transfers to restart once the new asylum system became applicable in June. Rome disputes how far those agreements extend to older cases, and Interior Ministry sources have told ANSA that Italy considers cases predating the pact already settled.
That disagreement has already stalled Germany’s first attempted transfer under the new rules this month.
Reciprocity Holds the System Together
Migration debates often collapse into arguments over compassion versus control, which obscures the administrative problem underneath. A functioning asylum system needs both protection for people with legitimate claims and enforceable procedures determining where those claims are examined.
Governments still have a legitimate interest in preventing multiple applications and uncontrolled secondary movement once somebody has crossed a border.
The same obligation falls on states themselves. Italy cannot reasonably demand stronger external-border cooperation while refusing responsibilities assigned under common rules, just as northern governments cannot expect Mediterranean states to carry disproportionate pressure without solidarity.
Finland’s decision therefore concerns more than a handful of flights back to Italy. Europe’s asylum rules only retain credibility once governments actually accept the obligations they impose on everybody else.
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