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Asylum processes in Germany take an average of over 18 months


Court proceedings due to rejected asylum applications are dragging on and on in Germany.

Berlin - Such processes lasted an average of 18.7 months in the first five months of 2024, according to a response to a minor inquiry from the AfD parliamentary group, which the Welt am Sonntag newspaper reported on. In November, a survey by the German Association of Judges among administrative courts and the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bamf) showed that the process took an average of 17 months. At the end of 2023, the Conference of Prime Ministers with Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) agreed on the goal of "concluding the asylum and subsequent court proceedings in three months each". The judges' association told the Welt am Sonntag that in order to achieve the goal, "around 500 additional" administrative judges would be needed nationwide: "A further concentration of asylum cases in centrally responsible courts could also speed up proceedings." The association called for a "personnel offensive for the administrative courts": "If nothing is done here, the judiciary threatens to become a bottleneck in migration management and crime prevention." The federal government's response also shows that the number of deportation detention places has fallen again despite the announced deportation offensive - from 800 to 790 since March. AfD interior politician Gottfried Curio criticized the decline as "completely incomprehensible." A number of federal states generally or currently have no such detention places. In Berlin, there are theoretically ten deportation detention places for dangerous people - but they are currently not usable.

"The facility is currently closed and is being renovated while the number of places remains the same," explains the Senate Department for the Interior. Bavaria wants to increase the existing 262 detention places by "an additional 100 detention places for deportation prisoners and 100 detention places that can be used variably for the execution of deportation detention or criminal and pre-trial detention depending on demand," said a spokesman for the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior. In North Rhine-Westphalia, the creation of additional detention places in a second deportation detention center is also planned. "We have sufficient deportation detention places in Hesse and are consistently deporting people, the numbers are rising," said Prime Minister Boris Rhein (CDU) about the 80 places in the state. "We would like to deport even more, but we need the repatriation agreements for that."

Photo: AP
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