Refugee Commissioner: “Many asylum procedures are neither ‘fair’ nor ‘speedy'”

The Commissioner for Refugees, Alabali-Radovan, has called for changes in the European asylum system. She also warned that Germany needed faster and more pragmatic decisions on asylum procedures.

The federal government’s refugee commissioner, Reem Alabali-Radovan, has called for “faster and more pragmatic” asylum procedures in Germany. They shouldn’t last months or even years, she said at a symposium on refugee protection on World Refugee Day in Berlin. “In recent years, many asylum procedures have been neither ‘fair’ nor ‘quick’. I’m thinking, for example, of the sluggish decisions on Afghanistan,” she said. In conversations with refugees and volunteers, she encounters a lack of understanding “why refugees are stuck in endlessly long asylum procedures”.

Germany must answer the question of whether someone is a refugee or not earlier. “Precisely because we have relatively efficient asylum structures compared to the EU and because we know that the Dublin system does not work satisfactorily.”

According to the so-called Dublin rules, an asylum seeker must apply for asylum in the EU country in which he is first registered. Anyone who has received protection in another EU country should not apply again in another country of the European Union.

Better standards for those seeking protection

Alabali-Radovan also called for changes in the European asylum system. “We have to push ahead with a fundamental reform of the European asylum system.” The aim must be a fair distribution of responsibility and responsibility for admission between the EU states.

At EU level, she called for better standards for those seeking protection in the asylum process and for integration in the member states.

EU level: step by step approach

Fundamental changes could not be enforced “with a crowbar,” said Alabali-Radovan, referring to EU countries that had blocked a reform of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) in recent years.

She advocated a step-by-step approach. That is “more promising than very far-reaching and detailed drafts for an EU-wide asylum procedure or an asylum and migration management regulation, which have been stuck for years,” said Alabali-Radovan. Not every EU member can and wants to contribute equally to the reform, she said. The lowest common denominator should not be the standard for a common European asylum system.