Brussels Courts Drowning in Migration Cases as EU Border Rules Tighten

The Palace of Justice on Rue de Trèves is running on fumes. Judges in the administrative law division have begun staggering hearings into evening slots to handle a backlog of 3,847 pending asylum and migration cases—the highest count since the court system began tracking numbers in 2014. The crush reflects a grinding reality for Brussels courts: as EU member states impose stricter border controls and faster deportation procedures, the judicial infrastructure that must review those decisions has become the bottleneck.

The timing matters. Across Europe, governments are tightening migration rules. Poland, Hungary, and several other member states have already implemented accelerated asylum procedures that compress decision timelines from months to weeks. Those decisions inevitably generate appeals. Many land in Brussels, where the Court of Justice of the European Union sits on the Rue de la Loi, and where the Belgian administrative courts must process domestic challenges to asylum denials. The judicial system never planned for this volume.

Brussels Court President Margot Hendriks did not return calls before publication, but courthouse staff confirmed the backlog figures through internal administrative records accessed by this publication. The Cour d'Appel—the court of appeal handling roughly 60 percent of administrative cases—has hired five temporary judges on fixed contracts through December, but even that addition has barely moved the needle. Processing times for first-instance asylum decisions have stretched from an average of 14 months in 2024 to 22 months today.

Where the Cases Pile Up

The Tribunal Administratif on Rue de Trèves is where most initial asylum appeals land. Built in the 1980s with capacity for roughly 150 hearings per week, the court now schedules 189 weekly hearings on average. Courtroom 7 and Courtroom 12—the only two equipped with simultaneous translation for Arabic, Dari, and Tigrinya—run back-to-back sessions from 8:30 a.m. until 6 p.m. on most days. Neither has air conditioning that functions properly; during last week's heat wave, one hearing was moved to the basement to maintain judicial proceedings as temperatures climbed past 34 degrees Celsius.

Lawyers practicing migration law at Brussels firms like DeBacker & Partners and the Brussels office of the International Rescue Committee Legal Unit say the delays have created a secondary crisis: clients stuck in legal limbo. Under Belgian law, asylum seekers must wait an average of 22 months for a hearing, then another four months for a written judgment. During that time, they cannot work legally in most sectors and subsist on state benefits of €9 per day. The psychological toll is measurable. A survey by the Plateforme Mineurs en Exil—a Brussels NGO tracking child asylum cases—found that 67 percent of minors awaiting decisions reported depression symptoms in 2025.

The Numbers Don't Lie

Belgium's Federal Migration Ministry recorded 18,400 first-instance asylum applications in 2025, compared to 12,100 in 2022. Most come from Sudan, Syria, and Afghanistan. About 31 percent are appealed when denied. That means roughly 5,700 additional cases per year are funneled into an already strained appeals system. The European Commission warned Belgium in a March 2026 report that judicial backlogs violate EU directives on asylum processing timelines, which require decisions within nine months except in exceptional cases.

The solution remains elusive. Budget proposals for 2027 include €4.2 million for additional judicial infrastructure, but that money won't translate into new courtrooms or hired judges until late 2027 at the earliest. The Bar Association of Brussels has submitted complaints to the Ministry of Justice twice in the past six months. Senior judges have privately told colleagues they expect the backlog to worsen before it improves.

For now, anyone filing an asylum appeal in Brussels should prepare for a minimum wait of nearly two years before seeing a judge. The courts are doing their job, technically. But the system itself—the buildings, the staff, the budgets—was designed for a different era. That gap between demand and capacity is the real crisis playing out in courtrooms across the city.