The international law standard of reviewing each asylum claim individually should be replaced by a common European capped intake, Thorsten Frei, chief whip of the centre-right CDU party, wrote in an op-ed published on Tuesday.
Germany is currently facing a surge in arrivals of irregular migrants on its territory, many of whom go on to claim asylum. About 160,000 people applied for asylum between January and June, a rise of more than 40% compared to the same period last year.
“According to the current legal standard, [Germany] would be obligated to take in 35 million people from [Afghanistan],” Frei wrote in an op-ed for the Frankfurter Allgemeine as he argued that the requirement to review asylum claims individually was a “flawed design”.
Germany’s constitution guarantees an individual right to seek asylum, as does the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which all member states have endorsed, while others protect individuals fleeing war and persecution.
Nobody would be prepared to “actually redeem the claims that resulted from it”, Frei claimed. “As a consequence, Europe focused on deterring claims, effectively only considering those of people who were sufficiently fit to reach German territory, which was “deeply inhumane”, he said.
Frei suggested a common European solution in the form of a capped quota of “300,000 or 400,000” people who would be taken in from war-torn countries and distributed among EU countries.
Quotas have been a recurring suggestion in dealing with rising numbers of asylum claims in Germany from the side of the opposition, with Jens Spahn, a leading CDU MP, suggesting the same in May whilst not questioning the individual right to asylum.
The German government dismissed Frei’s suggestion as attention-seeking.
“Apparently we’re already in the middle of ‘silly season’,” the Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock told reporters at an event in Bonn, according to dpa.
Meanwhile, EU governments agreed in June to reform the EU’s common asylum policy. Under the deal, asylum applicants will be distributed evenly among EU countries and allow for processing claims of some migrants directly at the border.
It still needs to pass the European Parliament.
(Nick Alipour | EURACTIV.de)
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