At least 6,704 Nigerians applied for international protection in Cyprus between 2021 and 2025.
This is according to the latest country report by the Asylum Information Database, a project of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, and compiled using data from Cyprus’s Asylum Service and the European Union Agency for Asylum.
The figure, an aggregate of yearly Nigerian applications recorded in AIDA’s Cyprus Country Reports for 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025, ranked Nigeria among the most consistent sources of asylum seekers into the Mediterranean island nation over the period, Sunday PUNCH observes.
This is as the number of asylum claims from Nigerians dropped by 70 per cent between 2022 and 2025.
A year-by-year breakdown shows that Cyprus recorded 1,555 Nigerian applicants in 2021, 3,148 in 2022, 1,019 in 2023, 554 in 2024, and 428 in 2025, the lowest figure recorded in the most recent data available.
