(Strasbourg) 538 thousand asylum seekers have been protected in the EU countries in 2017, and Germany, alone, took up 60% of them. A figure that is 25% less than that of 2016. This has been found by Eurostat, in a survey issued today. The country which most of such refugees come from is Syria (175 thousand people, one third of the total, with 124 thousand of them taken up by Germany), followed by Afghanistan (101 thousand) and Iraq (64 thousand). The country that comes second by number of protected people is France (40,600), then Italy (35,100), Austria (34 thousand), Sweden (31,200). Overall, 970 thousand applications were submitted in the year. Quite a different matter is the proportion of international protection granted to each nationality: protection (asylum, refugee status, humanitarian protection …) was granted to 94% of Syrians, 92% of Eritreans, 69% of Somalis, 60% of Sudanese, and, to a lesser extent, to Iraqis, Iranians, Afghans, Turks, Ethiopians, Gambians and Nigerians.