After the pushback allegations by several human rights organizations against the Federal Police, the authority described central asylum numbers in statistics published by the Federal Ministry of the Interior as “incorrect”. As a spokeswoman said when asked by SZ, in November and December 2022 not only 32 asylum applications from migrants were registered on the border with Austria, as was noted in February in a response from the Ministry of the Interior to a Bundestag inquiry from the left. Instead, there were a total of 582 asylum applications at the Bavarian-Austrian border in the two months.
How the error came about is unclear, it could be a transmission error, according to a spokeswoman. As a rule, answers to parliamentary questions are subjected to a quality check, they serve as an important working basis for politicians, associations and the media. The numbers should now be corrected. They are relevant because organizations such as the Bavarian Refugee Council base their suspicion on them that the federal police are systematically deporting asylum seekers back to Austria – without first having their asylum application checked by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. That would be illegal. The federal police deny this allegation.
The Refugee Council, together with two other NGOs, had made public reports of alleged pushback victims who had applied for asylum and were nevertheless said to have been pushed back to Austria without being checked. The allegations were backed up with official statistics. According to this, in November and December 2022 only 0.6 percent of more than 5,000 people who entered the country illegally submitted an application for asylum. What experts also described as a blatant discrepancy. After the correction, the rate is 11.2 percent.
“This process does not support the credibility of the federal police,” says Stephan Dünnwald from the Bavarian Refugee Council, criticizing the confusion of figures. “It’s worrying when figures published by the Federal Ministry of the Interior are grossly wrong.” However, the corrected statistics do not change the fact that thousands of people from the most common countries of origin for asylum, such as Syria, were pushed back to Austria – allegedly without an asylum application. The Refugee Council remains convinced that so many rejections “could not be legal”. The federal police said that “in any case, attention is paid to” whether those entering the country express a request for protection.