Presumably Ukrainian refugees deprived of the right to asylum challenge the decision of the German authorities.
The defendant is the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), which initially granted the family's application for asylum in Germany and then revoked it. As Deutsche Welle notes, this story is rather murky.
Signal from the scene
So far, it is only known that this family arrived in Germany in September 2014 and applied to the German authorities for asylum, claiming they fled the civil war in Syria.
The application was processed, by local standards, fairly quickly. On March 2, 2015, BAMF employees issued the family a temporary residence permit in Germany under a law providing subsidiary protection for refugees from war zones.
But a year later (April 13, 2016), BAMF decided to "completely and entirely" revoke the previously issued certificate granting refugee status to the family members. In an explanation received in response to a DW inquiry, the agency's press service said that this decision was preceded by a signal from the local foreigners' office responsible for housing refugees in dormitories, which believed that these applicants were not Syrians but Ukrainian citizens.
"Consequently," a BAMF representative told DW correspondent, "the recognition of refugee status on March 2, 2014 by the Federal Office was based on incorrect data provided by the applicants, who posed as Syrian refugees."
Awaiting linguistic expertise
According to the German press, the deception came to light after, having received refugee status, members of this family began telling everyone how they managed, without knowing a word of Arabic, to fool the German bureaucrats. Word spread, and then someone from the refugee dormitory reported it to the authorities.
During the court proceedings in Münster, the head of the family continued to claim that they were all Syrians, specifically Yazidis, who lived in Syria in a small Kurdish village where no one spoke Arabic, only Kurdish. 32-year-old Aziz S. was able to answer many specific questions from the judge. For example, about who owned the grocery store in their village, the names of the nearest villages, where the school was, or where the nearby railway line led.
How long the trial will last is not yet known. The judge decided to first order a linguistic examination to determine, based on the Kurdish dialect, where Aziz and his family members are from.
DW question – BAMF answer
Meanwhile, in Germany, people are asking how Federal Office employees could have recognized these migrants as Syrian refugees without even talking to any of them. DW correspondent asked this question to the BAMF press secretary.
Here is his answer: "In November 2014, the Federal Office introduced an accelerated procedure for Syrian asylum seekers. Later, this procedure was also extended to applicants from Eritrea and religious minorities from Iraq. The acceleration of the procedure was achieved by waiving personal interviews with asylum seekers by the decision-makers. Instead, Syrians, Eritreans, as well as Christians, Mandaeans, and Yazidis from Iraq had the opportunity to state the reasons for their flight in writing on a form."
BAMF explains the need to speed up the processing of refugee applications by "the strong increase in the number of migrants and the uniform assessment of the situation of the mentioned groups of persons." On March 17, 2016, after the influx of refugees into Germany reached its peak, the Bundestag passed a number of laws limiting the possibilities of abusing the right to asylum. The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees was then urgently requested by a special decree to ensure a personal interview with all asylum seekers who had submitted applications from that date onward.
The BAMF press service also deemed it necessary to inform DW that, in accordance with an order from the German Federal Minister of the Interior, the office intends to review all refugee applications it granted in 2015 and 2016 this year, including positive decisions made, as in the case of the family from Münster, without a personal interview.
All this, however, does not mean that Aziz S.'s family has no chance at all of getting the court to overturn BAMF's decision to revoke their refugee status. First, the German legal system has the principle of protection of legitimate expectations. And second, possible inaccuracies in BAMF's wording or failure by the agency's employees to meet the required deadlines could be interpreted in favor of the plaintiffs.