When it comes to the countries of origin of asylum seekers, Turkey ranks third behind Syria and Afghanistan. But what does President Erdogan want in exchange for cooperation on deportations?
In order to be able to deport rejected asylum seekers to Turkey more quickly, the federal government is relying on closer cooperation with Ankara. “We are working on it and I am sure that we will be able to report successes there in the next few weeks,” said Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) in the Bundestag in response to questions from MPs about progress in deportations to Turkey.
At the end of September, the federal government announced that Turkey had agreed to make practical improvements in the processing of deportations. This includes, for example, that rejected asylum seekers do not necessarily have to be taken to the embassy in Berlin to obtain replacement passport papers for repatriation, but that this can also take place at one of the Turkish consulates general.
In the first nine months of this year, 23,133 Turkish citizens applied for asylum in Germany for the first time. The so-called overall protection rate for asylum applications from people from Turkey, which were decided on this year, was 9.6 percent. Almost 1,300 Turkish citizens were deported from Germany in 2023. At the end of April 2024, around 14,500 Turks in Germany were required to leave the country.
At the end of August, Germany deported people to Afghanistan for the first time since the Islamist Taliban came to power; 28 criminals were on the plane. “There will be further deportations to Afghanistan in the near future,” said Faeser. It is also being examined how deportations of criminals to Syria could be organized.
The parliamentarians also asked questions about a new analysis unit that is being set up in the Federal Ministry of the Interior, which will deal with disinformation controlled from abroad. “We are now starting with 20 analysts,” said Faeser.
Before questioning the minister, the parliamentary managing director of the Green parliamentary group, Irene Mihalic, said that the question of “how we deal with the issue of disinformation and influence operations a year before the federal election” had not yet been answered satisfactorily. The Federal Minister of the Interior must do much more here.