LUXEMBOURG — The European Union’s highest court ruled on Thursday that member states may not detain asylum seekers solely because they arrive without identity documents, finding that the absence of papers does not on its own establish the “risk of absconding” that E.U. law requires before a person seeking protection can be locked up.
The ruling, by the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice, came in a case referred by a Croatian administrative court concerning a Syrian man identified in court papers only as A.K., who was held for 71 days in a reception center near Zagreb after crossing from Bosnia in 2024 with no passport. Croatian authorities argued that the lack of documents made it impossible to verify his identity and therefore likely that he would disappear before his claim was decided.
The court disagreed. “A large majority of persons who seek international protection reach the territory of the Union without documents, often because the circumstances of their flight made it impossible to obtain or retain them,” the judges wrote. “To treat that circumstance as sufficient in itself to justify detention would be to permit the detention of asylum seekers as a general rule, which the directive expressly prohibits.” Authorities must instead point to individual conduct, such as a previous attempt to evade controls or a refusal to cooperate with identification.
The decision binds courts across the bloc and is expected to affect practice most in the member states on the E.U.’s external borders, where detention on arrival is common. A 2025 study by the E.U. Agency for Fundamental Rights found that 12 member states listed missing documents among the grounds on which absconding risk could be assumed, and that in four of them it was the most frequently cited ground.
“This is the court doing what it has done for 15 years, which is to remind governments that detention is the exception,” said Sarah Delcourt, a professor of migration law at the Université libre de Bruxelles. “What is new is the timing. The pact on migration and asylum takes full effect next year, and it leans heavily on border procedures. The court has just drawn a line through one of the shortcuts.”
A commission spokeswoman, Elena Fischer, said the ruling was “fully consistent” with the pact and that the commission would issue guidance to member states. Croatia’s Interior Ministry said it would study the decision. A.K., whose asylum claim was granted in 2025, now lives in Rijeka and works in a shipyard, according to his lawyer. He did not attend the hearing. “He has had enough of courts,” the lawyer said.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 13 of the European edition with the headline: E.U. Court Rules Asylum Seekers Cannot Be Detained Solely for Lacking Papers.
