A controversial bill to accelerate the deportation of rejected asylum seekers was agreed upon by the German government on Tuesday, with members of the coalition speaking out against the move.
For weeks, the increasing amount of irregular migration has been on Berlin’s political agenda, with Interior Minister Nancy Faeser introducing stationary border controls and Chancellor Olaf Scholz urging to “finally deport on a large scale.”
Faeser presented the bill for an improved deportation process to “ensure that people without the right to stay have to leave our country more quickly.”
The main goal is to reduce the amount of failed deportations by extending the maximum duration of the so-called detention pending departure from the current 10 to 28 days. This should allow the officials more time to prepare for the deportation. In addition, the deportation of persons obliged to leave the country will no longer have to be announced in advance.
“In this way, we strengthen society’s support for the reception of refugees in Germany,” Faeser argued.
As a final step, the draft law will now be handed over to the parliament for final approval.
However, not all members of the Greens, part of the three-way coalition in Germany, share the same idea on how to handle the migration situation at the moment.
The proposed legislation “contains regulations that constitute disproportionate infringements of the fundamental rights to liberty, to inviolability of the home and privacy of the persons concerned,” said parliamentary leader of the Greens Filiz Polat.
The German government sees these steps not as tightening measures but as enforcing current applicable law.
How effective the measures to deport failed asylum applicants are remains to be seen. Four out of five people who are obliged to leave the country are still granted a tolerated right to stay due to factual or legal reasons.
As of October 2023, around 50,100 people are immediately obliged to leave the country. These are persons who have not exceeded the tolerated right time frame and could technically be deported immediately. Between January and June of this year, a total of 7,861 deportations were made.
The government is expecting “that the tightening of the obligation to leave the country will increase the number of deportations by about 600 (5%),” measured against the average 12,000 deportations between 2021 and 2022.
“Stricter deportation rules will hardly lead to significantly more people being deported, but they will lead to even more hardship and violations of fundamental rights. Already every second detention pending deportation is unlawful […],“ Wiebke Judith, legal policy spokesperson for the NGO ‘PRO ASYL’, stated.
(Kjeld Neubert | Euractiv.de)
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