Exclusive
Status: 10/14/2021 6:01 a.m.
Thousands of refugees had to go to court until the Foreign Office allowed their families to join them. Research by Contrasts, Ippen Investigativ and FragDenStaat. Lawyers call the Ministry’s conditions extortionate.
Tesfay Haile (name changed) fled Eritrea to Europe and has lived in Berlin since 2017. He wanted to catch up with his wife and four children to save them the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean. But it turned into an odyssey that lasted for years: his family first fled to neighboring Ethiopia. Two years passed before they got an appointment at the German embassy there, a third year until they were rejected.
Because the Foreign Office doubted that Haile and his wife are married. A church marriage certificate, as is customary in Eritrea, did not apply. At the same time as the rejection, a civil war broke out in Ethiopia, Haile was very afraid for his family, describes this time to us Contrasts as “hell”.
The only chance: he took the Foreign Office to court. Already at the first court hearing, this offered him a settlement: he should withdraw the lawsuit and assume all procedural costs, in return for which the visas would be issued. Haile agreed to it and now has to pay 3400 euros, he says. That is more than twice as much as he earns a month in his job at a mail order company. But he also says: “I had no other choice.”
“Berlin Blackmail”
Like Haile, thousands of refugees are doing. Lawyers watched the proceedings so often that they gave it a name. You speak of the “Berlin comparison”, some also of “Berlin blackmail”.
So far, the phenomenon has hardly been tangible. But now unpublished figures from the Federal Foreign Office provide insights into what has been happening regularly for years when German embassies around the world reject applications for family reunification. The internal statistics from 2007 are the ARD politics magazine Contrasts and his research partner Ippen Investigativ and the transparency platform FragDenStaat.
It reveals a pattern: when complaints about family reunification led to a subsequent visa being issued, this usually happened without a judgment – in around 95 percent of these proceedings. This was the case 5855 times. The Foreign Office apparently systematically linked the issuing of visas to conditions: those affected should withdraw their complaint and in most cases also bear the costs of the proceedings – even though the German authorities effectively corrected their previous decisions. Because the Federal Ministry is based in Berlin, these proceedings all ended up at the local administrative court.
The Federal Foreign Office rejects the accusation
“If the Federal Foreign Office determines in the course of the proceedings that the rejection was unlawful and therefore could not be made, then that is basically the recognition that there has been a violation of human rights,” says lawyer Christoph Tometten. He demands that the authorities then also bear the costs. With the “Berlin comparison”, the Foreign Office is taking advantage of the families’ predicament, said Tometten.
The SPD-led Foreign Office has the allegations Contrasts-Request back. The assumption of the procedural costs is regulated by law, the visa sections have no intention of preventing families from reuniting. In many cases, family reunification is a statutory and sometimes even constitutional right.
According to official figures, Germany grants an average of around 100,000 visas per year for family reunification and rejects around 20,000 applications. Only in a few cases there are lawsuits, the ministry told Contrasts. According to the statistics, more than 20,000 families have complained since 2007 – almost one in three successfully.
Families wait years
Those who only went out of court with a “Berlin settlement” complain about dramatic consequences. This is shown by reports from those affected with whom Contrasts and Ippen have spoken investigative. Tesfay Haile says, for example, that he became depressed because he couldn’t see his children for so long. “I didn’t know when my family was coming, whether they could come at all.”
At the trial in the summer, his lawyer Julius Engel played a wedding video of the couple for the judge – as further evidence of the marriage. Only now did the Foreign Office move. Haile’s wife and four children have recently been living with him in Berlin, after four years of waiting.
His lawyer Julius Engel advises clients to accept the settlement for reasons of time. Legal proceedings that ended with the issuing of a visa after an agreement lasted around 300 days on average, while proceedings with a positive court judgment for those affected lasted more than 150 days longer.
No judgment, no precedent
Attorney Tometten complains about another effect in the “Berlin settlement”: “That means that in such cases there is no judgment and in this respect there is also no precedent.” Such is not a legal requirement for visa procedures, but it is “especially available” – if only because all complaints are heard before the same administrative court in Berlin.
In the “Berlin comparison”, the policy of the federal government becomes almost symptomatically clear, so the left chairwoman Janine Wissler opposite Contrasts. The Foreign Office deliberately complicates family reunification. “From a constitutional point of view, this is a very problematic procedure, because if you end up making a comparison in all of these cases – if these numbers are like this – then you obviously have the impression that you cannot win the court proceedings.”
The Green Bundestag member Luise Amtsberg, spokeswoman for refugee policy in her group in the last legislative period, sees signs of a structural problem: decisions that should be made at the authority level would ultimately be made in court. “There is a political solution to this, which means: to increase the staff in embassies.”
In fact, on request, the Federal Foreign Office announced that it had taken steps to increase staffing levels for visa departments and that it would continue to do so. It did not provide any information on the specific scope of these plans or the timeframe.
ARD will report on this topic on October 14, 2021 at 9.45 p.m. in the program “Contrasts”.