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In 2018, Germany’s asylum office BAMF came under fire for supposedly wrongly issuing numerous positive asylum decisions. Now, German courts have ruled in favour of 66 refugees whose positive asylum decisions had been revoked. Benjamin Bathke/DW reports
German administrative courts have ruled in favour of 66 refugees after they brought lawsuits against the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF). They were appealing the withdrawal of their positive asylum decisions.
That’s according to the newspapers of the Funke Media Group of Wednesday (February 17), citing an answer by the federal government to an inquiry of the Left parliamentary group.
The rulings come nearly three years after proceedings about asylum decisions in a branch of of BAMF caused a scandal.
In these new rulings, judges reinstated refugees’ protection status in 66 cases brought since 2018. Moreover, 11 lawsuits were stopped for unknown reasons. In only ten cases, the courts rejected the claim against terminating the protection status.
The proceedings in the BAMF branch office in Bremen, northern Germany, made headlines across Germany in 2018. The branch office was accused of falsely issuing numerous positive asylum decisions.
According to the interior ministry, 184 lawsuits were filed in total. Nearly half of these cases (91) haven’t yet been decided by the courts. Six cases were decided in 2017.
After the revelation of the allegations, BAMF reviewed numerous already decided asylum applications internally. According to the Funke Media Group, the interior ministry said BAMF had recognized 213 procedures in which “the requirements of a withdrawal were existent as the certificate of recognition was wrongly issued.”
Commenting on the rulings, Left Party (Die Linke) parliamentarian Ulla Jelpke said BAMF’s Bremen branch office had decided the asylum applications “rightly and lawfully.”
The withdrawals of those recognitions, in contrast, were “false and unlawful,” Jelpke said. The “vast majority” of the contentious granting of protection, according to Jelpke, had been confirmed, as information from the federal government shows.
© InfoMigrants/ with KNA
