Through fictitious paternity, foreign women try to secure German citizenship for their children
As "Russkaya Germaniya" writes, the illegal "business model" looks like this: a pregnant foreign woman finds a man – a German citizen – pays him to register fictitious paternity, and also pays for the services of a lawyer and notary. As a result, the newborn receives German citizenship, and the mother of a German citizen gets the opportunity to legally stay in the country on this basis. Recently, this scheme has been widely used by young women from Southeast Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. The fee for "paternity" is up to 5,000 euros.
"We are talking about numerous cases; we record them every month. One individual even claimed paternity of ten children," cites an example Martin Steltner, official spokesman for the Berlin prosecutor's office. "In just one of Berlin's women's shelters, there are currently 70 pregnant Vietnamese women whose future children already have fictitious fathers."
According to the federal Ministry of the Interior, since the beginning of 2017 alone, about 5,000 cases of fictitious paternity have been identified nationwide. In Berlin, 700 such cases have been discovered. According to State Secretary of the Interior Ole Schröder, "this scheme operates throughout Germany, and on a national scale, the number of cases of fictitious paternity registration is significant. The fictitious fathers do this for profit," Schröder explains. "This means we are dealing with serious crime."
A reasonable question arises: what about the financial obligations of these essentially fictitious but formally legal fathers towards the child until adulthood, and in case of possible university studies, even up to age 27? The answer is simple: none at all! Because all "dads" suspected of fictitious paternity are "professional" welfare recipients, from whom nothing can be recovered. Under German law, the state takes care of the children.
But while until recently it was almost impossible to stop this fraudulent scheme, the situation has now changed. Last week, the Bundesrat approved a law that allows faster and more effective deportation of those who have been denied asylum. The law establishes, in particular, that registering fictitious paternity for the purpose of obtaining the right to stay in Germany is an offense. And if the Foreigners' Office finds that paternity was registered fictitiously, the child will not receive German citizenship, and the mother will lose the grounds for staying in Germany. Moreover, both she and the fictitious father may be prosecuted for document forgery and violation of immigration law.
But human rights advocates have already spoken out against this norm. For example, Berlin lawyer Oda Jentsch, who deals with refugee and asylum seeker rights, believes that the new law "turns notaries and guardianship authorities into tools of the foreigners' offices and discredits the notaries' duty of confidentiality regarding information entrusted to them."
The law itself, according to Frau Jentsch, from a constitutional law perspective "deprives children of any certainty regarding their family, social, and civic affiliation." According to Michael Heym, a Bonn-based lawyer specializing in immigration law, "the main consequence of the new law will be that young families will be subjected to official checks in any case, even if suspicions against them are unfounded."
It seems that the official representative of the German Federal Ministry of the Interior, Annegret Korff, expressed herself more convincingly: she called the new law "a preventive measure that takes fundamental rights into account, aimed at preventing offenses related to granting the right to stay in Germany."