Migrants in Germany increasingly suing government
She filed an appeal last December. A half-year later, she is still waiting for a decision.
BERLIN — The refugee wave that buffeted Germany in 2015 is now crashing down on the nation’s courts, as migrants seeking relief from the Syrian civil war challenge efforts by one of Europe’s most welcoming states to limit their rights.
Some 250,000 asylum appeals are pending across Germany, according to estimates from an association of administrative court judges. Nearly 13,500 are ongoing in the capital alone, part of a tenfold increase over the past year.
Stephan Groscurth, a spokesman for Berlin’s administrative court, said the appeals — filed by the growing number of migrants who have been denied protection or given less than they were seeking — make up two-thirds of court business. “This will paralyze us for years,” a judge told Der Tagesspiegel, a German daily based in Berlin.
The courts are the last bastion of hope for Amira Suleiman, 44. She has not seen her husband or 12-year-old son for two years — not since she fled to Germany from Syria, setting out from the Palestinian refugee camp at Yarmouk, a war-ravaged place in Syria that had once been their home.
The separation was supposed to be temporary, as family reunification is a right owed to refugees under European law. But Suleiman isn’t a refugee, according to Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees.
Instead, the migration office assigned her only subsidiary protection status that carries no right of family reunification, recognizing that she may suffer harm in her country of origin but denying her protection as a refugee. Hundreds of thousands are in the same position, as Germany has substantially reduced the rate of refugee claims it accepts.
“I have no other way of making my family whole again,” Suleiman said. “I thought this was my right, and when I heard, I thought, ‘How could this possibly be?’”
Reunification a flashpoint
The conflict over subsidiary protection and family reunification remains in the shadows of an intensifying global debate over the duty of nations to aid refugees. A recent flash point is the situation on the Mediterranean Sea, where a record number of people died last year fleeing war and poverty in North Africa.
But the debate’s throbbing heart is still Germany, whose chancellor, Angela Merkel, said earlier this month she would not cap the number of asylum seekers her country would admit.
In 2015, she welcomed more than a million migrants, saying, “We can do this” — a declaration of German resolve tinged with enduring national guilt over the crimes of the Nazi past. But now, thousands of asylum seekers are taking her government to court for denying them protection under the 1951 Geneva Conventions on refugees. Many have won. Asylum seekers from Syria have seen a nearly 90 percent success rate on appeal, according to the federal migration office, although higher courts have reversed some of these decisions. The overall success rate for asylum seekers appealing their decisions is lower, but it has also climbed in recent years.
An administrative court judge in Berlin, Kai-Christian Samel, said the task is deciding whether migrants “are as individuals subject to political oppression or if they are just in fear of indiscriminate danger.” This is also what the migration office is charged with doing.
“The courts are cleaning up the mess,” said Nora Markard, a law professor at the University of Hamburg. “The success rate tells us how important judicial review is — and how important it is for people to have legal representation.”
The surge of appeals reveals the precariousness of policies adopted by the European Union’s largest state to address the most extreme displacement of people since World War II. It comes as the German government pivots to limit migrants’ rights, spurred by public opinion that has turned against an open-door policy following attacks carried out by militants from Muslim-majority countries.
The cases reflect the resistance of asylum seekers to a reinstatement of Europe’s old border regime. And they point to the critical link between migration and family reunification, knotted issues also under scrutiny in American courts weighing the legality of the Trump administration’s travel ban.