Germany tightens asylum rules and simplifies the procedure for extraditing refugees
As "Russkaya Germaniya" notes, it was necessary to actively cooperate with BAMF officials when initially filing an application for refugee status. In other words, during the first interview at a BAMF branch, the immigrant was obliged to provide all his documents, report personal data, and outline the life situation that forced him to leave his homeland. These are the current rules in effect.
Starting next year, asylum seekers will be subject to another obligation. Now we are talking about the time period related to the rechecking of asylum applications. Within three years, refugees will be obliged to cooperate in every way with immigration authorities, that is, to present to the agency's officials all the new documentary evidence that may be required, as well as any additional information.
It is expected that by 2020, BAMF will recheck up to 800,000 previous decisions in this manner. Special attention will be paid to cases where there is a "reasonable doubt" that the refugee provided truthful data about his identity. Systematic checks of immigrants' mobile phones will likely become a mandatory part of this procedure.
Over the past year, BAMF officials resorted to such measures 18,000 times, analyzing not only the language and its dialects used by refugees in their correspondence, but also conducting geolocation of the places captured in photographs. If asylum seekers refuse to cooperate with German authorities, the new rules provide for fines or even imprisonment for such "refuseniks."
Commenting on the amendments to the asylum legislation approved by the Bundestag in early November, Federal Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer stated that the new rules will "significantly improve the quality" of processing asylum applications. After all, it is no secret that at the height of the immigration crisis in 2015, refugees' personal data or their citizenship were entered into BAMF forms without detailed verification, which ultimately led to numerous violations.
How effective the new rules will be is not yet very clear. In any case, Bundestag deputy from the CDU Detlef Seif is confident that "even one case of improper granting of asylum is already too many." The rechecking of applications carried out so far, in the deputy's opinion, "was akin to a blunt sword," as asylum seekers could easily evade it.
Only representatives of the Greens and the Left opposed the new legislative rules. Thus, according to Ulla Jelpke, an expert on domestic policy from the Left party, changing the current procedure for rechecking refugee status "instills serious uncertainty in people" and also increases the workload on BAMF officials themselves. Günter Burkhardt, head of the human rights organization Pro Asyl, for his part, emphasized that currently 99 percent of administrative cases related to the revocation of refugee status end with the status being retained.
Meanwhile, the German Federal Ministry of the Interior is now trying to further "complicate the lives" of asylum seekers by developing new immigration rules. This primarily concerns those refugees who have been denied admission to Germany and must leave the country. Thus, it is proposed that those who have been denied their application will be able to leave the dormitory from midnight to six in the morning only after appropriate notification. Violating such a schedule could result in imprisonment for refugees. In justifying the innovation, the Ministry of the Interior cites that these rules are already successfully in effect in Hesse and Lower Saxony.
In addition, it is proposed that all immigrants subject to extradition will receive all postal items only via a special electronic card. In this way, the authorities will know exactly when the refugee was served with a notice of impending extradition. The German Federal Ministry of the Interior is also expanding cooperation with international airlines, which will have to not only increase the number of seats for refugees subject to extradition, but also issue air tickets without a first and last name for such passengers.
All these measures, according to the ministry's leadership, will simplify and speed up the entire procedure for deporting refugees from Germany. According to the Ministry of the Interior, last year a ban on re-entry into Germany was imposed against 39,610 deported foreigners. As of the end of October this year, this figure stands at 29,790 people.