21/10/2026
Europe has become a fortress. People die trying to reach it.
Over the past fifteen years, the EU and its Member States have adopted successive policies restricting the rights of people seeking protection in Europe. Their cumulative effect is a system in which the right to asylum remains formally recognised while becoming increasingly difficult to exercise in practice.
The right to asylum has not formally disappeared. But the ability to reach Europe, access an asylum procedure, receive fair treatment and retain protection has steadily diminished.
Legal assistance has been weakened. Residence permits have been shortened. People are detained while their claims are examined. Family reunification has been restricted. At Europe’s external borders, the absence of safe routes forces people fleeing war and persecution to take increasingly dangerous journeys.
People have been denied access to asylum procedures, subjected to pushbacks or left without assistance at sea. These practices have resulted in inhuman treatment and preventable deaths. At the same time, divided responsibility between EU agencies and national authorities can make accountability difficult.
Taken together, these developments reveal a system increasingly shaped by deterrence rather than protection.
Fortress Europe is created to unveil all of this.
Fortress Europe is an interactive map that brings together official Eurostat data with national timelines developed by organisations working directly with people seeking protection across Europe.
By putting fifteen years of political decisions and their consequences into one shared record, Fortress Europe makes a long-term development visible: the gradual dismantling of access to asylum and protection.
This is not only a record of individual laws or policy changes. It is an invitation to look at the bigger picture. It is a tool that reviews how access to human rights and asylum is repeatedly restricted.
Go to https://fortresseurope.org/?country=SE&org=3 to review the impact for yourself.
