France received more asylum seekers last year than any other industrialised country in the world, pushing the United States into second place and Britain into third, a UN report said today.

The overall number of refugees seeking to flee to Europe and North America fell sharply in 2004 for the third year in a row, reaching the lowest level since 1988, the UN high commissioner for refugees said.

The country receiving the most applications in 2004 was France, with an estimated 61,600 asylum seekers, a 25-page UNHCR report said.

The United States, which received the most applications in 2003 with 73,780 applicants, came in second in 2004 with 52,360. Britain dropped from second to third, with 40,200.

Germany, the most popular destination among asylum seekers for 13 of the past 20 years, was fourth in 2004 with 35,600 applications, while Canada was fifth with 25,500.

However, a different picture emerges when the number of asylum seekers is looked at relative to the total population of the host country. Using a per capita formula over the past five years, UNHCR ranks Cyprus, Austria, Sweden, Luxembourg and Ireland as the top receiving countries in the 25-member EU, with the UK, France and Germany all coming in the middle of the table.

Russian nationals, most of them Chechens, made up the largest nationality seeking asylum in other countries, with 30,100 applicants. They were followed by 22,300 people from Serbia and Montenegro, many from Kosovo.

In third place were Chinese, with 19,700.

All 10 leading asylum-seeking nationalities recorded a significant drop in numbers in 2004, but there were particularly noticeable falls from three regions that underwent regime changes in recent years.

"The three big groups at the turn of the century - the Kosovars, followed by the Afghans and the Iraqis - have all three fallen away very considerably," said Rupert Colville, a UNHCR spokesman.

"Perhaps most strikingly of all, the number of Afghans - the top group in 2001 with more than 50,000 asylum seekers - has fallen by 83 percent in the past three years. They now stand in 13th place with 8,800.

"No big group has really come up to replace them."

Another possible reason for the downward trend in some European countries has been "very restrictive legislation" on asylum seekers and "rather hostile attitudes", Mr Colville said, adding that it was possible that refugees had been going underground because of hostility toward asylum seekers in some countries.

"If genuine refugees are not now claiming asylum because they’re concerned that the system is loaded against them, that obviously would be very worrying indeed, and it may be the case in some countries."

The fall in numbers of asylum seekers had been dramatic in Britain, said Mr Colville, where numbers have plummeted 61 percent over the past two years to the levels of the early 1990s.

He said he wasn’t sure why France had risen to the top.

"It’s not a big increase in France: four percent," he said, suggesting the rise might have been "a little bit of balancing the scales" with Britain after the closure of the Sangatte refugee camp in France in 2002 that was serving as a staging post for refugees slipping into Britain.

He noted that the nationalities of people seeking refuge in the United States tend to be much different from those entering Europe because of geography and historical ties, with many US arrivals from Haiti and Latin America.

Although crises continue in other parts of the world, such as Congo and the Darfur region of Sudan, most of the people fleeing those areas were too poor to contemplate going as far as Europe, Colville said.

"Most Afghans are poor, too, but the poorest of the poor weren’t coming to Europe," he said. "It was more the middle-class Afghans and Iraqis who were moving onwards - people with some education, some kind of money they could pool from family members to pay the amount of money they needed to travel to Europe."

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