In the German asylum debate, the term pushback – a nonsense of the year 2021 – mostly appears in connection with distant incidents. So-called pushbacks have been documented several times at the external borders of the European Union – i.e. the active defense against refugees who want to apply for asylum. Such refusals violate the Geneva Refugee Convention and EU law. Only recently documented the New York Times using videos of how the Greek coast guard picked up twelve refugees, including a baby, on the island of Lesbos in April and abandoned them in a rubber dinghy on the open sea. They are ugly pictures, but they are far away. Seemingly.
German authorities have recently come under suspicion of pushback. The Bavarian Refugee Council accuses the federal police together with two other NGOs, to systematically reject asylum seekers at the Bavarian-Austrian border. It’s not about boats and life-threatening maneuvers at sea. But the principle would be the same: close to the limit, even beyond what is permitted.
The Austrian lawyer Petra Leschanz interviewed those affected for the Pushback Alarm Austria association and documented their accounts. The refugees say that they were pushed back to Austria by German police officers, although they had articulated a request for protection. In such a case, the police are not allowed to turn away those entering the country, but have to take them to an initial reception center to examine the asylum application. Leschanz’ club recently worked through similar events on the Austrian-Slovenian border. Some of them became later classified as “unlawful” by courts.
“Dozens of Syrian war survivors report formalized pushbacks by German officials in the border area with Austria,” says Leschanz. There are reports from Munich, Freilassing and Passau – over several months. “It’s not about isolated cases, it’s about systematic practice.” The federal police denied that.
For example, a Syrian reports that he took the train from Salzburg to Munich on November 15, 2022to apply for asylum in Germany. He is said to have been picked up during a police check at Munich Central Station and taken to a refugee camp. Three days later, according to the report, he and three other people are said to have been unsuspectingly put in a police van and taken back to Salzburg – although he had explicitly asked for asylum in Germany.
According to the logs, another Syrian is said to be at the train station in Freilassing, right on the border with Austria, to have been stopped by the police. He was taken to a cell and searched in December 2022. He had to “strip completely naked” in front of the police and crouch down. He asked for asylum, but he too was brought back to Austria. The representations cannot be verified.
However, the SZ has documents on another case from November 2022 that has not yet been made public. It’s about a Syrian who was picked up by the federal police in Vilshofen, questioned and pushed back to Austria – with a two-year entry ban in his luggage. “You have not asserted any reasons that make it necessary to refrain from deportation,” says the order of the Federal Police Inspectorate in Passau, in other words: no asylum application. The papers state that he has not applied for asylum in any other EU country.
“You can’t not ask this crucial question at the border”
According to Leschanz, the man in Germany “explicitly applied for asylum.” Why isn’t that in the docs? “If the log was correct, the question of the reason for entering the country was not even asked,” she says. “But you can’t not ask this crucial question at the border.”
The Federal Police generally rejects the allegations on request. One pays “in any case” to whether a person asks for protection after crossing the border or not. “Certain words such as ‘asylum’ are not required, but they are not sufficient on their own either. The authority leaves concrete questions from the SZ unanswered despite repeated inquiries by e-mail and telephone.
In November and December, the statistics recorded more than 5,000 illegal entries – but only 32 asylum applications
For example, the question of how the following numbers can be explained: According to federal police statistics, there were 22,824 unauthorized entries last year found at the border with Austria. An asylum application was officially registered in only twelve percent of the cases. The discrepancy is particularly noticeable in November and December: the authorities noted a total of 32 asylum applications out of more than 5,000 people who entered the country illegally. Or as the NGOs calculate: 0.6 percent.
“How can it be that thousands of people from the main countries of origin make it to the German border and then, allegedly without applying for asylum, are pushed back?” asks the Bavarian Refugee Council. The many rejections could “not be done legally”. The Federal Ministry of the Interior only briefly states: “The federal police do not record the reasons why people do not submit an application for asylum.”
Experts believe the allegations are credible. Of course it could be that some refugees cross the German border to apply for asylum in another country, says Maximilian Pichl, a legal and political scientist at the University of Kassel. He researches migration law. It could also be that there are translation problems here and there and misunderstandings between police officers and those affected. “But even then, the discrepancy between rejections and asylum applications is striking and in great need of explanation,” he says. Should the pushback suspicion be confirmed, it would “undermine the rule of law,” said Pichl. He even speaks of a “crisis of the rule of law”.
Karin Scherschel, Chair of Flight and Migration Research at the University of Eichstätt, also believes the descriptions are plausible. “The allegations must be checked,” she demands. From their point of view, the cases are part of an increasingly restrictive asylum policy. “Federal policy is primarily aimed at preventing migration, as can be seen from the results of the last refugee summit.” The decision paper from May is full of terms like: repatriations, border controls, detention pending deportation. Germany approved EU plans for asylum applications to be processed in a kind of detention center at the external borders. “What is completely missing from the debate: these are measures that do not react to the flow of refugees from Ukraine, even though they are a large part of this challenge,” says Scherschel.
But such differentiations seem to have no place at the moment. Not even the Greens, who have so far stood for an open approach, have opposed the tightening in the federal government. They exhausted themselves in the fight for the heating law. “The social outcry is missing,” says Karin Scherschel. That is tragic.