The interior ministers of the states are pushing for the deportation of serious criminals and Islamist threats to Afghanistan and Syria, thereby triggering a controversial debate. Criticism is coming from refugee organizations. The Left Party also believes that deportations to Afghanistan, where the Islamist Taliban rule, are incompatible with the constitution and international law. Human rights violations are a threat there, they say.
Since Wednesday, the Conference of Interior Ministers (IMK) has been discussing asylum and migration policy in Potsdam – also as a result of the fatal knife attack on a police officer in Mannheim. “We must protect our constitutional state from extremist threats of all kinds,” said Brandenburg’s Interior Minister Michael Stübgen (CDU), who chairs the conference.
The demand by several interior ministers to end the payment of citizen’s allowance to war refugees from Ukraine also sparked controversy. Instead, they want to ensure that only lower payments are made under the Asylum Seekers’ Benefits Act. Brandenburg’s minister Stübgen argued that citizen’s allowance had become a “brake on taking up work”. He received support from Baden-Württemberg. Similar demands were made by the FDP parliamentary group. The federal government, however, rejects this. The German Association of Cities also rejected the proposal on Wednesday.
On Thursday, Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (SPD) will inform her state colleagues about her efforts to deport people to Afghanistan. “We are negotiating confidentially with various states to open up ways to make deportations to Afghanistan possible again,” Faeser confirmed in an interview with the “Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung”. The aim is to consistently deport violent offenders when they are released after serving a prison sentence in Germany. “And we want to consistently expel and deport Islamist threats.”
The spokesman for the SPD’s interior ministers, Hamburg Senator Andy Grote, said at the start of the ministerial conference on Wednesday evening in Potsdam that he was very confident that an agreement with neighboring countries would create a functioning travel route that would guarantee repatriations. “The airport in Kabul is functioning, travel across land borders is functioning.” Hamburg has submitted a corresponding motion on deportations to the ministerial conference.
“Anyone who commits serious crimes here must leave the country, even if they come from Afghanistan, for example,” said Grote. He assumes that this will work and that work is now being carried out very decisively and very quickly. Lower Saxony’s Interior Minister Daniela Behrens (SPD) said: “It must be secure in the rule of law; courts must not stop us.”
Grote is counting on broad support from his colleagues in other countries for his conference proposal to deport criminals and dangerous individuals to Afghanistan and Syria. “I believe that we now have a great deal of agreement on this issue.” From Grote’s point of view, Germany’s security interests outweigh the criminal’s interest in protecting them. According to Grote, Hamburg is dealing with 18 cases of Afghan criminals who are legally required to leave the country.
Criticism comes from aid organizations. They want to protest against deportations to Afghanistan in Potsdam this Thursday.
Bavaria’s Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann (CSU) said in Potsdam that the federal government must be more active and quickly create the conditions for deportations. North Rhine-Westphalia’s Interior Minister Herbert Reul (CDU) also said: “It has to be done, not just talked about.” However, he does not consider deportations to be the central problem, but rather that excessive influx of migrants needs to be more strictly limited.
On Wednesday, the Left Party in the Bundestag criticized this: “Deportations to the Taliban regime mean stoning and flogging. Human rights also apply to perpetrators, because they are universal.”
Recently, several acts of violence by Afghans have attracted attention. Last Friday evening, police officers in Wolmirstedt near Magdeburg shot dead an Afghan who had allegedly stabbed a fellow countryman and then injured several people at a European Championship garden party. On May 31, an Afghan in Mannheim killed a police officer with a knife and injured five members of the anti-Islam movement Pax Europa.
Saxony-Anhalt’s Interior Minister Tamara Zieschang (CDU) is also calling for an immediate halt to the federal admission program for people at risk from Afghanistan. As a result of the knife attacks, several countries are demanding a tightening of gun laws and an expansion of gun-free zones. Faeser also wants to reform gun laws again. However, some of her proposals are met with resistance from the coalition partner FDP.
Since the radical Islamist Taliban seized power in Kabul in August 2021, Germany has stopped deporting anyone to Afghanistan. The basis for the decision of the immigration authorities, who handle the deportations with the support of the Federal Police, is the current situation report from the Federal Foreign Office on the situation in the country of origin.
