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| © Michaela Rehle / Reuters |
Germany has been giving
“financial incentives” to the embassies of some African countries to accept
asylum seekers from third states who have been rejected by Germany without the
consent of the migrants, a refugee aid organization claims.
RT
report continues:
Berlin
has been adding specific “Readmission Agreements” to development aid accords
with African countries in order to deport asylum seekers to these countries –
regardless of their actual country of origin, “Pro Azyl” (For Asylum), a German
refugee rights organization, alleges.
“These
agreements commit the African countries to readmitting their own citizens who
have had asylum turned down by Germany, but it also allows them to readmit
rejected asylum seekers from other countries, who travelled through these
transit states,” Max Pichl, a member of Pro Azyl, told The Local.
According
to the relief organization’s data, if German authorities are unable to deport a
rejected asylum seeker because they lack sufficient information and documents
to determine or confirm their country of origin, they address a third nation’s
embassy and pay for documentation to be issued “confirming” such a person’s
nationality as their citizen so that the migrant can eventually be deported to
that country.
“It
is difficult to say how many people it affects. The cases only come to light on
an individual basis when someone who has been sent back to Africa reports it,”
Pichl told The Local, adding that there is “a very long list of countries with
whom Germany has such agreements,” according to which “countries are obliged to
take back migrants, but nothing more is specified.”
At
the same time, the data provided by the German Federal Office for
Migration (BAMF), which is specifically responsible for deporting rejected
asylum seekers, suggests that Germany has 13 such agreements, with only two
countries from the list – Morocco and Algeria – actually being African.
Apart
from Morocco and Algeria, the BAMF’s list includes Albania, Syria, Kosovo,
Serbia, and Macedonia.
BAMF
has not revealed how many people have been deported under these agreements,
stating only that “these arrangements make it possible for foreigners to return
or be returned via the contracting Member State without the need of a transit
visa.”
Additional
payments for 'successful identification'
Similar
issues were reported by German weekly Der Freitag on Tuesday, claiming that the
rejected refugees whose country of origin cannot be determined are sent to
meetings with the employees of some of the countries they could be potentially
legally be sent back to.
In
2014, German federal authorities ordered 720 “stateless” asylum seekers to
attend 50 such meetings with representatives from 18 different African
countries, the weekly claims, adding that “an indefinite number of such
meetings organized by the regional authorities” had taken place during the same
period.
Germany
allegedly pays the embassies for these “refugee hearings.” According to Der
Freitag, Berlin also gives them additional money if they subsequently issue
relevant documentation for the rejected asylum seekers – so-called emergency
travel certificates – which allow German authorities to deport a person “within
days.”
The
meetings with the embassy employees take “several minutes,” and are therefore
insufficient to determine a person’s actual country of origin, Der Freitag
claims, implying that they are only a formality used by Germany to deport
unwanted asylum seekers.
At
the same time, some countries are said to be rewarded more generously for their
efforts than the others. Benin, which issues identification documents for “stateless”
refugees in three quarters of the cases, receives €300 for every such “identification,”
while Nigeria, which “accepts” only one in two, gets €250, according to Der
Freitag.
The
weekly wonders whether giving asylum seekers identification documents without
their consent and against their will is a regular practice, citing an example
of a man who claimed he was from Sierra Leone, but was eventually given
Nigerian identification documents.
In
the meantime, payments to the Nigerian embassy have been suspended “to extract
a bit of the smell of corruption,” the paper adds, citing Ulla Jelpke, a member
of the German Die Linke (the Left Party).
In
view of the unending refugee inflow, German public opinion, as well as the
sentiments of the country’s political establishment, has gradually turned
against the German government’s open arms refugee policy.
According
to one recent poll, 40% of Germans want German Chancellor Angela Merkel to
resign over her refugee policy, while small arms sales in the country
skyrocketed after a wave of New Year’s Eve assaults in the German city of
Cologne.
At
the same time, the German Chancellor’s Bavarian allies are threatening her with
a lawsuit over her migration policy, and a member of the European Parliament
from Alternative for Germany (AfD), a German anti-immigration Eurosceptic
party, has even suggested that she should flee to South America in exile to
escape retribution for allowing over a million immigrants to enter Germany.
Facing
intense public pressure, the German government announced another package of
tougher asylum regulations on Friday that included expedited deportations and a
delay in family reunifications.
German authorities have
previously had to defend their questionable policy of requesting foreign
embassies to “conduct nationality checks.” According to an official reply to a
parliamentary question from Die Linke (the Left party) in 2011, the government
regarded such procedures as “often the only possibility to establish the
nationality of the person to be deported.”
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