A father (first applicant) and his two daughters (second and third applicants), all Syrian nationals requested international protection in Austria on 12 September 2022. They stated that they had left Syria in 2014 due to the war. On 3 August 2023, the Federal Office for Immigration and Asylum (BFA) rejected refugee status and subsidiary protection, and granted them temporary residence permits.  

The applicants appealed. The Federal Administrative Court upheld the appeals without oral hearings and granted refugee status. It held that that the first applicant had demonstrated an oppositional attitude towards the Syrian regime and, therefore, this could lead to him being ‘suspected, punished or arbitrarily detained’. This meant that the daughters would return to Syria as single young women without family support at risk of ‘acts of violence, significant interference with their (sexual) integrity and/or serious threats from Syrian society’, with the Syrian authorities neither able nor willing to provide protection. The court acknowledged that the place of origin of the applicants, Shuyukh Tahtani, in the immediate vicinity of the city of Kobane/Ain al Arab in the Aleppo Governorate, was under control of the Kurdish forces, but noted that the security situation in northeastern Syria was particularly volatile and the Syrian regime forces were present in all major cities in northeastern Syria, including in the home region of the applicants. BFA lodged an extraordinary appeal before the Supreme Administrative Court (SAC), arguing that the presence of Syrian regime forces was limited to certain areas and was of a symbolic nature and that the first applicant, the father, was not exposed to any asylum-relevant dangers from the Syrian government due to the lack of access and so he should not have been granted asylum. 

The Supreme Administrative Court found the lower court’s reasoning contradictory: on one hand, it stated that the Syrian regime lacked control over Kurdish self-governing areas, yet on the other, it assumed regime access to the applicants’ home region. Referring to the Thematic Report of the State Documentation – Syria: Border Crossings (25 October 2023), the court noted that while some government forces were present, their role was limited to deterrence and patrols, with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) remaining the primary controlling authority in the region, with the ability to recruit and arrest the local population. 

The court also criticised the lower court’s assumption that the daughters would be returning without family support. It held that the possibility of wider family support in Syria should have been considered, especially since the reasoning simultaneously excluded the father from return. 

The Supreme Administrative Court upheld BFA’s appeal and annulled the decision of the lower court for violating procedural provisions.