Send them back: the toxic issue of German deportations

The issue of deportation has become a major flashpoint in the debate over immigration that is rocking Germany, said Deutsche Welle (Bonn). Last year, official figures indicated that 158,000 people who had been denied asylum were still living in Germany. Since then, the tabloid Bild has been running a campaign to highlight what it sees as the system’s gross deficiencies: that the government appeared to have lost track of the whereabouts of 30,000 of those rejected applicants. And of the 24,000 people ordered to be returned to their home country in the first five months of 2018, only 11,000 had been deported. The issue came to a head last week with the deportation of an alleged former bodyguard for Osama bin Laden.

It’s “madness”, said Bild (Berlin). For two decades, our country has harboured this man, whom the authorities simply refer to as Sami A.. He lived here with his wife and four children, pocketing s1,100 a month from the state while preaching sermons against it. He has also radicalised young Muslims: two of whom have been convicted of belonging to an al-qa’eda cell. But though we have begged the authorities to send him back to his native Tunisia, they refused, claiming that he might be tortured there. This month, however, they finally saw sense and ordered his deportation. But no sooner was the plane in the air than a court denounced the deportation as “illegal”, and demanded that he be returned to Germany at once. Pure “lunacy”. Thankfully, the Tunisians have refused, or we would be stuck with him again.

Showing softness to such people does appear to play straight into the hands of far-right populists, said Gereon Asmuth in Die Tageszeitung (Berlin). But the law is the law. After the German migration office ordered Sami A.’s deportation, an administrative court ruled that it was “grossly unlawful”. But by the time it had faxed its decision to the police, Sami A. had already been bundled onto a plane. It’s still unclear if this was a genuine muddle or the authorities pulling a fast one. “Either it’s absolutely embarrassing chaos or it stinks to high heaven,” as leader of the Greens Robert Habeck put it. But there’s no doubt it was illegal, and the court was right to demand Sami A.’s return.

It’s a clear victory for Horst Seehofer, the hard-line interior minister and leader of Bavaria’s right-wing CSU, said Stephan Detjen in Deutschlandfunk (Berlin). He has long pushed Angela Merkel to agree to close borders to refugees, and demanded that courts stop putting obstacles in the way of deportations. But creating a climate in which inconvenient legal norms are circumvented and courts are “tricked” can only do harm in the long term. Germany, of all countries, can’t afford to weaken the rule of law. We’ve seen in Poland and Hungary what happens when the judiciary ceases to be independent.

But the deportation issue has come back to bite Seehofer, said Felix Steiner in Deutsche Welle. Shortly before Sami A. was deported, 69 rejected asylum seekers were sent back to Kabul. These deportations, unlike Sami A.’s, were probably quite legal. But they were blatantly unjust. The government claims it only deports criminals and those who refuse to integrate, but the 69 Afghans were law-abiding, had learnt German and were paying taxes. Volunteers had devoted time to helping them settle in; companies had offered them jobs. Two of the younger deportees were detained the night before they were to take their final school exams. The Afghans’ plight has attracted public sympathy. When Seehofer joked about their deportation, saying, “I didn’t even order it”, he was widely condemned. And at the news that one of the Afghans has committed suicide, anger has turned to calls for Seehofer’s resignation. In Germany, the rule of law and basic common sense part ways on the issue of deportation. The system must be radically reformed.