Interior Minister Faeser sees “historic momentum” for EU refugee policy. The traffic light coalition has agreed to seek asylum procedures at the external border. The target deadline is ambitious.
A few days before the summit meeting on German refugee policy on May 10, Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) sees a “historic momentum” at the European level. She has been working for a long time to ensure that distribution within Europe needs to be improved, she emphasized Report from Berlin.
The traffic light coalition now agrees that they want to advance a common asylum system. This also includes asylum procedures at the EU’s external borders, in which migrants are registered, recorded and identified. “I think it’s incredibly important to register and identify as early as possible so that we can continue to have open borders in Europe,” said Faeser. According to the Federal Minister of the Interior, the procedures should not last longer than twelve weeks.
Working group with EU countries
This new approach also includes the fact that, after these procedures, there are member states in the countries of arrival that show solidarity and then take these people in. She’s been negotiating this for months.
Faeser reported in the ARD broadcast by a working group in which Italy and Spain were represented as first host countries and potential host countries such as Germany, France and more recently Belgium and Sweden. She said nothing about whether Eastern European countries such as Poland or Hungary are also involved in the process.
fiber referred in Report from Berlin again that many people from Syria and Afghanistan are coming to Europe. The protection rate for these people is very high, so there are few rejections.
The Common European Asylum System defines how asylum seekers are treated in the EU. According to the Dublin Regulation, a refugee must apply for asylum where they first entered the EU. In fact, many Mediterranean countries no longer record all migrants who then move on to other countries.
More secure countries of origin?
There is always a dispute between the parties represented in the Bundestag about the origin of migrants. Ahead of the meeting with the federal government on May 10, some prime ministers are pushing for the list of safe countries of origin to be expanded. According to Hamburg’s First Mayor Peter Tschentscher (SPD), this would speed up the asylum procedures at the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees and the administrative courts and relieve the burden on states and municipalities, as a Senate spokesman told “Welt”.
He named Georgia, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and India as country examples. People from these states would submit a large number of asylum applications, but would only have an extremely low protection rate. According to Tschentscher, the individual right to an individual case assessment in the asylum procedure would remain unaffected by this.
Kretschmer demands pressure from Berlin
Saxon Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer believes that Georgia, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia should be classified as safe countries of origin as “urgently necessary”. In these four countries there is only a “minimum recognition quota”.
Hesse’s Prime Minister Boris Rhein (CDU) said it was “the task of the Greens, the SPD and the Liberals at federal level to ensure that outdated positions that are no longer up to date are discussed again”. In the “Welt am Sonntag” Rhein also called for at least a doubling of federal aid for states and municipalities, which currently totals 2.75 billion euros.
Frei demands more money and more controls
Thorsten Frei, parliamentary director of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, also calls for better financial support for the municipalities. The promised 2.75 billion euros are “clearly not enough,” he said in the report from Berlin, “because the challenges relate to integration as a whole, to day-care centers, to schools, to housing and much more.”
Few decisions in February
At a meeting in February, the federal and state governments agreed on better cooperation and more transparency. The topic of finance was postponed at the time – perhaps also because the federal government had not yet paid any money to the municipalities due to the lack of a legal framework.