2024-09-01 09:49:40
Since the attack in Solingen by a young Syrian, the debate about deportations has gained momentum. But what is the legal situation and the situation on the ground?
The attack in Solingen has reignited the debate about security and migration. The suspect is a 26-year-old Syrian who presumably acted out of Islamist motives. Now CDU leader Friedrich Merz, among others, is calling for ways to deport rejected asylum seekers back to Syria and Afghanistan – even if in this specific case deportation to Bulgaria failed. In addition, there have been calls for a general ban on admissions.
t-online provides an overview of the current situation.
No. The Federal Republic of Germany is not currently deporting people to Syria. However, new measures have been discussed since the fatal knife attack on a police officer in Mannheim at the end of May.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) has announced that he will allow the deportation of serious criminals and terrorist threats to countries such as Syria or Afghanistan. Threats are people who the security authorities believe are capable of committing serious politically motivated crimes, including terrorist attacks. According to previous information, convicted criminals are said to have served a large part of their sentence in this country before a possible deportation. However, Germany currently has no diplomatic relations with the Taliban rulers in Kabul or with the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
In the specific case of the alleged perpetrator of the Solingen attack, Issa al-Hassan, deportation failed – but to Bulgaria. Deportation to Syria was not an option here. Bulgaria was the first EU country he entered and according to the Dublin Agreement he should have applied for asylum there. Since he missed the applicable deadlines for this, he was granted subsidiary protection in Germany.
Ambiguous. “This depends on the risk assessment by the responsible authorities and courts,” says legal expert Winfried Kluth from the Expert Council for Integration and Migration (SVR) to the German Press Agency. “On this issue, it has been examined for some time whether it is sufficient if individual parts of the country can be classified as safe (at least for certain groups of people).”
However, opinions differ here. The Foreign Office still sees major security problems in Syria in particular. The jurisprudence of German courts is not uniform. A recent ruling by the Higher Administrative Court in Münster caused a stir when it stated: “For civilians in Syria, there is no longer a serious, individual threat to their life or physical integrity as a result of arbitrary violence in the context of an armed internal conflict.”
Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens) argued on RBB Inforadio that deportations to Syria and Afghanistan are already possible in individual cases, although “not trivial”. She defended her ministry’s situation reports as a decision-making aid, which presented the situation on the ground based on reports and facts. “You can base yourself on that as a court, you can base yourself on that as a state government. Nobody has to base themselves on the facts that we describe.”
Justice Minister Marco Buschmann believes deportations to Syria are possible. The government would have to give up its position of not talking to the Taliban or the Syrian government.
However, he rejects a ban on accepting asylum-seeking Syrians and Afghans. “The fact that we say across the board for the whole EU or Germany that we will no longer accept certain people is a legal problem,” said the FDP politician on the ARD morning magazine. “I think we have to talk about the number, we have to talk about distribution in Europe, we have to talk about protecting the external borders, but we cannot simply say that no one is allowed to come to us anymore.”