Not only the upheaval in Afghanistan, but also the Corona pandemic caused far-reaching changes and delays in asylum repatriations. Twelve charter flights had to be completely cancelled last year, three of them to Nigeria. The reason: the persons to be deported refused a PCR test.
Negotiations had to be held with Egypt, Morocco, Algeria and Turkey on how to deal with such persons who rejected the test, as reported by the newspaper Kurier. In total, 43 asylum seekers managed to avoid deportation in this way.
Last year, the number of persons forced to leave the country rose to a total of 9,148, of which 54 per cent were voluntary. In the first year of the pandemic, the number of people ordered to leave the country had plummeted by a significant 30 per cent. In 2021, despite the restricted air traffic, 52 charter flights were carried out, which is more than double the number in 2020, when there were 22 flights.
838 transfers took place under the Dublin III agreement, which requires asylum seekers to be returned to the country where they first entered the EU. Most of them were sent to Slovakia (918), followed by Hungary (434), Romania (360), Serbia (319), Poland (265) and Nigeria (120). The costs for the forced deportations amounted to 2.44 million euros.
https://exxpress.at/corona-test-verweigert-43-asylwerber-entgehen-der-abschiebung/