The burden of asylum applications on the civil justice system

The real crisis facing civil justice risks being the way in which judicial offices handle applications for international protection. This is made clear by figures from the CSM’s research department, which show a surge in applications: whilst the capacity to process cases has remained, in essence, stable over the period 2019–2025, at an average of around 35,000 cases per year, the number of new cases has, by contrast, seen a significant increase, rising from around 38,000 in 2023 to around 80,000 in 2025.

A trend which, as the CSM points out, has had inevitable repercussions on pending cases, which have also doubled over the same period (from around 67,000 in 2023 to around 133,000 in 2025). The High Council of the Judiciary states in writing that ‘the analysis in question shows that, at the rate of around 40,000 cases resolved in 2025, it would take more than three years to clear the entire backlog accumulated as at 31 December 2025’.

The situation has been further exacerbated by the entry into force last June of the European Union Pact on Migration and Asylum. Indeed, as a result of the European Commission’s decision of 5 August 2024 to the Italia has been allocated a mandatory quota of 16,032 border procedures for the first year (June 2026–June 2027), rising to 24,048 in the following year and 32,064 once the system is fully operational (from June 2028 onwards). This represents 26.7 per cent of all border procedures across the entire European Union.

This trend is clearly placing considerable pressure on judicial offices, particularly certain ones, and broadens the perspective to include the impact of international protection on civil matters as a whole. In the table below, the focus is on new cases, but the outcomes of pending cases are not very different. Thus, in Bologna, immigration proceedings account for over 30 per cent of all pending civil cases, whilst in Trieste (the location with the most critical figures) the figure reaches 50 per cent, whilst Court of Appeal districts such as Milan and Turin are close to 20 per cent.

This is why the issue of resources is so crucial – a matter on which the CSM itself places great emphasis. In the Guidelines approved at the last plenary session before the summer recess (which contain statistical analyses for each Court of Appeal), the emphasis is in fact placed on calls to the Ministry of Justice, which has set out a framework for action through the latest decree-laws establishing theOffice for the Streamlined Proceedings to tackle the backlog emergency, in light of the safeguards required by EU law for the processing of every application for international protection.