Asylum: Poor quality of the asylum procedures causes more legal proceedings

According to the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP), the fact that the German administrative courts have to deal with an increasing number of asylum cases is largely due to the poor quality of the asylum procedures at the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF). The human rights organization criticized that many of the decision makers at the BAMF are lacking knowledge about the countries of origin and that they are not sufficiently trained – as can be seen from some of the rejected applications. Thus, in order to get protection, some of the asylum seekers have no choice but to go to court.

“The fact that Oromo from Ethiopia, Baluchans from Pakistan, and Hazara from Afghanistan who applied for asylum in Germany have received identical letters of regret clearly shows that the BAMF is not sticking to the legal requirement that every case has to be checked individually” said Ulrich Delius, the director of the STP, in Göttingen on Monday. “Many of the decisions are also based on information and assessments that are no longer valid – or were made under consideration of irrelevant facts.” For example, several Oromo were rejected stating that the hunger catastrophe in Ethiopia is over. The arbitrary arrests, torture, and other human rights violations were not considered.

Apart from the aspect of better training for the BAMF-employees, the STP also demands more transparency in the asylum procedures. “It is a shame that the country-reports of the Federal Foreign Office, on the basis of which the BAMF is supposed to make decisions, are strictly confidential. Many of these reports are based on information that is false, contradictory, or no longer up-to-date,” Delius criticized. “If the reports were more transparent and publicly accessible, this could help to improve the quality of the individual decisions.”

“The BAMF must take the principle of case-by-case examination more seriously. It is a scandal that asylum applications of human rights activists are rejected as ‘obviously unfounded’ even though they are massively persecuted in their home country,” emphasized Delius. “The decision-makers are often not informed about political persecution in the countries of origin – or about the aspect that some of the countries are not to be seen as states of law.”

In response to a parliamentary question, the German Ministry of the Interior had stated that, by July 2017, the administrative courts had to deal with 287,000 asylum cases in that year – twice as many as in the entire year 2016. 

Header Photo: Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge via Wikimedia Commons