Many people who came to Germany for humanitarian or political reasons did not receive child benefit for years. Wrongly so, says the Federal Constitutional Court.
The Federal Constitutional Court this Wednesday declared the law of 2006, according to which the child benefit claims of foreigners from outside the EU should be treated as restrictively as unconstitutional. It was not even the first such attempt by the legislature. A regulation similar to the one in Karlsruhe had already failed in the 1990s. The new regulation of 2006 should actually create clear conditions.
Accordingly, nationals from non-EU countries who are allowed to stay in Germany for reasons of international law, humanitarian or political reasons should receive child benefit after three years of residence – but only if they had a job, were on parental leave, or received unemployment benefit I. From the point of view of the government coalition at the time, all of these were signals of integration into the labor market and thus signs of permanent residence. Only then should there be child benefit.
According to the court, however, this violates the principle of equal treatment.
The law was already changed in 2020
The decision comes with a long delay. The Lower Saxony finance court had already appealed to the constitutional court in 2013 because it considered the child benefit rule to be unconstitutional. This finding was already obvious at the time because the constitutional judges had objected to an identical provision on child-raising and parental allowances the year before. The reprimand from Karlsruhe on child benefit was therefore predictable – which is why the black-red coalition had changed the relevant law two years ago.
Therefore, the decision now serves primarily as a clarification, also for future attempts at reforming child benefit. The Federal Constitutional Court makes it clear that foreigners with humanitarian residence permits should not face higher hurdles than other non-EU foreigners. It is legitimate to make access to social benefits for members of so-called third countries dependent on a longer or permanent stay in Germany being expected. Also in order to avoid “immigration into the social security systems”, according to the resolution.
However, integration into the labor market is more likely to be a suitable criterion for the prospect of staying for foreigners looking for work – but not for people with humanitarian residence permits. This is because “the length of stay for most humanitarian residence permits depends more on the situation in the countries of origin of those affected than on their own life planning”. For example, about a civil war ending.
Several parents from Russia, Vietnam, Palestine and Iran complained, whose claims date back a very long time; the children are now almost all grown up. Any subsequent payment claims in your and in comparable cases – if any proceedings are still open – should be manageable in terms of amount. As a rule, the lost child benefit entitlement was compensated for by social benefits. For this reason, the exclusion of child benefit mainly had an effect where those affected had their own assets and therefore did not receive any social benefits.