European Union asylum laws are not fit for purpose and Germany is being abused by an influx of economic migrants with the luxury of handpicking which European nation they’d like to settle in, Germany’s former most senior judge has claimed.
Prof. Hans-Jürgen Papier, who served as president of the Federal Constitutional Court for eight years until 2010, accused successive federal administrations of acknowledging the shortcomings in the EU asylum policies but failing to do anything about it and called for fundamental reform to address the issue.
“We have another migration crisis,” Papier wrote in an op-ed for the Bild newspaper, claiming that “essentially nothing has changed” from the previous crisis of 2015.
“Many people come to our country from all parts of the world for clearly non-asylum reasons. The right to asylum is therefore being misused and, in many cases, applied for improperly in Germany,” he noted.
The former top German judge criticized the insufficient nature of the European asylum system as a whole, but further lamented the fact that this “is then reduced to absurdity at the internal borders when people who have entered Europe illegally can also choose where they ultimately want to settle, traveling through several EU states in order to get to Germany.”
Papier noted that under the Dublin II Regulation, which codified the requirement for asylum seekers to make their applications in the first European country they enter, this shouldn’t be allowed to happen.
“Nevertheless, Germany allows these people to enter the country anyway,” he wrote.
He called for the German government to resolve the matter “as quickly as possible” by introducing regulation “that works quickly and provides clarity.”
“It is not about affecting the right to asylum for people who are actually being persecuted, it is about protecting this right from being abused for reasons that are clearly unrelated to asylum.
“It cannot be the case that every man or woman in the world, even if there is obviously no reason for asylum, can illegally and ultimately make their way first to the European Union and then to Germany using the asylum law inappropriately,” he added.
Papier proposed a number of possible solutions to be discussed, including the third-country solution involving offshore processing, which has been considered in other European nations including Denmark and the United Kingdom. He warned that this “would have to be done in compliance with international law standards,” a matter that London is currently having problems with after the governing Conservatives’ legislation was effectively struck down on this point by the U.K. Supreme Court.
He also suggested the introduction of a similar process to the “electronic entry permit system” in the United States, which would allow for a preliminary asylum check to ascertain the potential credibility of an application before an individual can be admitted into Germany.
“In any case, our state cannot continue to remain helpless. It must not continue to stand by or even allow illegal migration to ultimately become legal migration of often unlimited duration,” Papier concluded.
