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Interior ministers are discussing the possibility of deporting individual criminals to Syria, a country with a civil war. But even in the case of a political settlement, numerous obstacles remained.
By Michael Stempfle, ARD capital studio
Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer caused much excitement even before the Interior Ministers Conference. He wanted to advocate that “instead of a blanket ban on deportation, in the future, at least for criminals and those at risk, we will check again in each individual case whether deportations to Syria are possible,” said the CSU politician at the end of November.
Attack in Dresden
The trigger is apparently the terrorist attack in Dresden in early October. As far as we know, a 20-year-old Syrian threat stabbed a gay couple with a knife. One of the two men died. The alleged killer was no stranger. He has a criminal record and was found guilty of assault, among other things, in 2019. A deportation to Syria, despite all the information, was not examined.
There are currently more than 90 Islamist threats with Syrian citizenship living in Germany. Even if they have committed criminal offenses and have even lost their protection as refugees, they currently cannot be deported. The reason for this is the blanket ban on deportation, which interior ministers recently unanimously agreed to at their biannual conferences. The reason for the stoppage is, in a nutshell: constitutional states do not deport to countries where the regime threatens to torture or die.
“The prisons and torture rooms are full”
“There is a civil war in Syria, thousands of people, including numerous children and women, are victims of the Assad regime every year,” Lower Saxony Interior Minister Boris Pistorius said. “The prisons and torture rooms are full.” No EU country is deporting there, not even Hungary, recalls the SPD politician.
The complaints of some CDU ministers could already be clearly heard in previous IMK meetings in which federal and state interior ministers discussed security in Germany. With Horst Seehofer’s tailwind, now they want to prevail.
“There will be no decision at the interior ministers conference for a further extension of the ban on deportation to Syria. The Union’s interior ministers agree on this,” said Joachim Herrmann of the CSU. “The fact that the SPD continues to reject any debate, even in the case of serious criminals and Islamist threats, is seriously considering deportation to Syria, in my opinion it is irresponsible in terms of security policy.”
In Bavaria alone there are currently more than 70 serious criminals and ten threats from Syria who cannot be deported. Among them is a 34-year-old Syrian who has been sentenced to five years and six months in prison for attempted murder and dangerous bodily injury, Herrmann said.
Criticisms of the head of IMK, Maier
The president of the conference of interior ministers, Georg Maier, is upset and speaks of “populism”. “We, the interior ministers of the SPD, would also deport people who have committed serious crimes or who are dangerous for Syria,” says Pistorius.
However, there have been no diplomatic relations with the Assad government for years, including no German embassies, and no German diplomats in Syria. “All of this is absolutely necessary to initiate and implement the deportations,” said Pistorius, who represents the SPD interior ministers at the interior ministers conference.
Why Afghanistan but not Syria?
But why, under German law, can criminals be returned to some parts of Afghanistan, where the security situation is also extremely precarious, but not to Syria?
Daniel Thym, an expert in European and international law at the University of Konstanz, has prepared a legal opinion on the return of people in danger to countries with little security. In simple terms: from a legal point of view, deportations are not fundamentally excluded. But the obstacles are very high.
Case-by-case review for Damascus?
According to European law, it is initially conceivable to divide Syria, similar to Afghanistan, into certain regions. This stems from a current status report from the European Asylum Office EASO.
“While individual regions remain generally unsafe, so deportations are generally illegal, a case-by-case examination must be conducted for Damascus. Political unrest, widespread crime, isolated terrorist attacks, and massive rights violations Human rights by security authorities do not in themselves constitute a blanket ban on deportation, “he says in Thym’s nearly 50-page summary of the report.
But then comes the list of exceptions: numerous groups of people would have to be excluded from deportation to Damascus because, after all, they would not be safe there. Deportations should also be carefully justified. Overall, it would take a long time to clarify which parts of Syria could be considered safe. National and international reports on the situation in Syria should be consulted without those of the Federal Foreign Office occupying a privileged position.
No message
Even if immigration authorities or the BAMF came to a decision that a Syrian threat should be deported, much remains to be clarified. Since Germany does not have diplomatic relations with Damascus, the interior ministers of the countries responsible for the deportations would first have to find a third state to accept the threats and take them to Syria. Turkey would be conceivable. The question, however, is what interest Recep Tayyip Erdogan might have in doing this favor to Germany. And even if an organizational structure existed, the courts would have a voice before deportation.
