GERMANY: Government Announces Plans to Tighten Controls at All Borders ― First Deportation to Afghanistan Since Taliban Takeover ― Senior Official Proposes Deportations to Rwanda ― NGO Raises Concerns About Possible Misinterpretation of Court Ruling Re…

• The government has announced plans to introduce tighter controls at all of its border crossings.
• Germany has carried out its first deportation to Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power in August 2021.
• Special Commissioner for Migration Agreements Joachim Stamp has suggested that migrants who enter the EU irregularly via the eastern borders could be deported to Rwanda.
• ECRE member organisation PRO ASYL has expressed concerns about a possible misinterpretation of a ruling by the Higher Administrative Court (OVG) of North Rhine-Westphalia on subsidiary protection for Syrians.

The German government has announced plans to introduce tighter controls at all of its border crossings. Germany has been operating temporary checks at its borders with Czechia, Poland and Switzerland since October 2023 and it introduced temporary checks at all borders during the European football championships, Olympics and Paralympics that took place June-September 2024. Announcing the new measures, which are due to take effect on 16 September, Federal Minister of the Interior and Community Nancy Faeser told journalists: “We want to further reduce irregular migration. To this end, we are now taking further steps that go beyond the comprehensive measures currently in place”. “Until we achieve strong protection of the EU’s external borders with the new Common European Asylum System, we need to strengthen controls at our national borders,” she added. The government also informed the European Commission (EC) about the measures taken under Article 25 of the Schengen Border Code, which allows for the temporary reintroduction of controls at internal borders. On 10 September, Faeser said that the government was planning to send people who applied for asylum to “prison or other institutions with strict conditions” close to the borders with its nine neighbours while it reviewed whether they should be returned to another EU member state under the Dublin Regulation. She added that all further steps to return “Dublin cases” should be completed “within five weeks”.

Germany’s decision to introduce border checks all over has drawn mixed reactions from other EU member states (MS). Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk described it as “unacceptable” and vowed to consult other EU MS with a view to considering a possible response “also at the EU level”. He also suggested that, for Poland, a more useful reaction by Germany to recent events, including the deadly knife attack on 23 August in the city of Solingen (North Rhine-Westphalia), would be “a strengthening of the participation of states, including those such as Germany, in guarding and securing the external borders of the European Union”. Austrian Federal Minister of the Interior Gerhard Karner told the Bild newspaper that Austria would “not accept people who are rejected from Germany,” adding: “There is no room for manoeuvre”. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis also criticised the move, saying: “It would not be right to move towards a logic of ad hoc exemptions from Schengen (…)”. Mitsotakis also hinted that Germany’s welfare policies may partly explain why the country attracts large numbers of refugees and migrants. “The reality is that today there are countries in Europe that attract not only illegal immigrants but also refugees, who have refugee status in one European county and move – as they have the legal right to do – in another European country,” he said, adding: “This is something that should concern Germany itself, and it is certainly not our job to indicate, which has constitutional limitations, how the welfare state will be organised”.

Other EU MS governments were predictably more supportive of the German government’s decision. “On border control and combating illegal immigration, Germany is following the line of the Italian government (…),” said Italian Undersecretary of State to the Ministry of the Interior Wanda Ferro, adding: “The decisions of the German government express the growing awareness across Europe of the need to crack down on trafficking networks, to ensure legal and safe entry for those who can work and those who are genuinely entitled to protection”. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban X posted a message welcoming German Chancellor Scholz to the “#Stop Migration club”.

The EC declined to comment on Germany’s recent decision. In response to a question about the necessity, proportionality and exceptional nature of the measures, an EC spokesperson told journalists on 10 September: “The Commission is in touch with the German authorities”. Civil society organisations (CSOs) were considerably more vocal in their responses to the measures. “Mass pushbacks also at German borders. No longer just a dream of right-wing radicals, no longer just a populist demand of the opposition – but now the reality under a government of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals,” X posted ECRE member organisation PRO ASYL. Amnesty International Germany published a joint statement in which it and 26 other organisations, including ECRE member organisations Arbeiterwohlfahrt (AWO), Diakonie Deutschland, Der Partitätische Gesamtverband, PRO ASYL and Terre des hommes, wrote that “the current debate about an alleged emergency and the rejection of asylum seekers at German borders is endangering European cohesion” and that “asylum policy challenges can only be solved jointly and at a European level”. They appealed to the German government to “not sever the umbilical cord to Europe by going it alone at national level and throwing European legal requirements overboard” and to “stand up for a Europe of the rule of law and human rights”. Nonetheless, it should be noted that the measures announced by the government fell short of proposals put forward by the opposition Christian Democratic Union party, which included invoking Article 72 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU in order to derogate from EU asylum law, for instance by suspending the acceptance of new asylum applications. The lawfulness of activating Article 72 has been widely debated in recent weeks as it is intended for emergency use only and, as such, its use is tightly circumscribed by the Court of Justice of the EU.

Away from the debate about border controls, Germany has carried out its first deportation to Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power in August 2021. On 30 August, Federal Government Spokesperson Steffen Hebestreit said in a statement that a flight carrying 28 Afghan nationals, all of whom were “convicted offenders who had no right to stay in Germany and against whom deportation orders had been issued”, had taken off from Leipzig/Halle Airport in Saxony. Austrian Federal Minister of the Interior Gerhard Karner praised the action and said that it was “crucial” that people were deported to the Afghanistan and Syria. CSOs were more critical. Commenting on reports by Al Jazeera that negotiations between the German government and the Taliban to arrange the deportation had been facilitated by the Qatari government, Tareq Alaows from PRO ASYL described it as “a declaration of bankruptcy for the constitutional state” and a potentially “irresponsible normalisation of the Taliban regime”. His words were echoed by the head of Amnesty International Germany, Julia Duchrow, who said: “No one is safe in Afghanistan. If the German government nevertheless deports people to Afghanistan, it risks becoming an accomplice of the Taliban”.

Elsewhere, German Special Commissioner for Migration Agreements Joachim Stamp has suggested that migrants who enter the EU irregularly via the eastern borders could be deported to Rwanda and that the German government could make use of the facilities that were paid for by the UK as part of its now-abandoned Rwanda scheme. Speaking to the Table.Briefings podcast, Stamp described the people who arrived in Germany irregularly via Belarus and Russia as elements in the two countries’ leaders’ “hybrid warfare against the West”. He explained the rationale behind his identification of the east African country as a possible destination for deported migrants, saying: “We currently have [no third country] who has come forward, with the exception of Rwanda” and that the German government could “utilise the existing structures that were originally prepared for the British”. German Ambassador to the UK Miguel Berger drew a distinction between Joachim Stamp’s proposal and the previous UK government’s scheme. “There is no plan (…) to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda,” he said, adding: “The discussion [in Germany] is about processing asylum applications in third countries under international law and with support of the United Nations”. Commenting on the proposal, the director of the human rights advocacy and support organisation Stand for All, Daniel Sohege, X posted: “Setting aside the illegality of the Rwanda Policy, which Germany can’t get around by just passing a law to say that an active dictatorship is “safe”, and the inhumanity of it, the plan is even more unworkable for the continent than the UK”.

And finally, PRO ASYL has expressed concerns about a possible misinterpretation of a ruling by the Higher Administrative Court (OVG) of North Rhine-Westphalia on subsidiary protection for Syrians. The ruling was based on the case of a man from Hasaka province in northeastern Syria who had arrived in Germany in 2014. The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) refused to grant him refugee status or subsidiary protection as he had received a prison sentence in Austria due to his involvement in people smuggling prior to his arrival in Germany. On 22 July, the OVG published a press release about its judgement from the previous week (16 August) in which it stated that there was “no longer any serious, individual threat to the life or physical integrity of civilians in Syria as a result of arbitrary violence in the context of an internal armed conflict (civil war)”. This was reported in several media outlets shortly afterwards (see here, here and here) but, as PRO ASYL reported a week later, the written reasons on which the ruling was based were not publicly available when the press release was issued and, as a result, “asylum law experts had little chance to assess the actual arguments and possible consequences”. After having analysed the arguments when they were eventually published three days after the press release, PRO ASYL wrote in an article on its website that it was “shocked at the thin factual basis on which the judges based their assessment”. In addition, commenting on the court’s assessment of the situation in Syria, Wiebke Judith from the organisation told DW that: “The rather harsh decision of the Higher Administrative Court ignores what is actually happening in Syria”. “Reports from, for example, the Foreign Office and the European Asylum Agency reveal that Syria is not a safe country,” she added.

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