Five years after Germany let in hundreds of thousands of refugees, many from Syria, the coalition government is at loggerheads over whether to lift a ban on deportations to the war-torn country.
The ban on expelling Syrians to their devastated homeland, in place since 2012 and extended several times, is due to expire at the end of the year.
The subject will be on the agenda of a four-day conference of Germany’s 16 state interior ministers and federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer starting Wednesday.
Calls for a change in stance have been growing since a Syrian man was arrested in November on suspicion of carrying out a deadly knife attack in the city of Dresden.
Prosecutors said the 20-year-old, accused of killing one tourist and seriously injuring another, had a host of criminal convictions and a history of involvement with the Islamist scene.
He had been living in Germany under “tolerated” status granted to people whose asylum requests have been rejected, but who cannot be deported.
“Why was this Syrian Islamist not in preventive custody or deported?” Friedrich Merz, a contender for the leadership of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU party, asked in the weekly Der Spiegel at the time.
Seehofer, of the CDU’s Bavarian sister party Christian Social Union, in late November came out in favour of the ban being lifted “at least for criminals and persons considered dangerous”.
‘Signal’ to criminals
This would send “a signal” to criminals “that they have forfeited their right of residence in Germany”, he said through an interior ministry spokeswoman.
Merkel has remained reticent on her minister’s calls ahead of Wednesday’s meeting.
But other conservative officials, including Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann, have backed Seehofer’s calls.
“There will be no decision in favour of a further extension of the ban on deportations to Syria. The Christian Union interior ministers agree on this,” Herrmann told the DPA news agency ahead of the conference.
But the idea of lifting the ban has also drawn fierce opposition, not least because of the still fraught humanitarian situation in Syria.
Thuringia’s Interior Minister Georg Maier of the Social Democrats, in coalition with the CDU in Merkel’s “grand coalition” government, sees a “slim chance” of Seehofer’s proposal becoming reality.
The SPD interior ministers are opposed to lifting the ban “for legal and practical reasons”, Maier told the daily Neue Osnabruecker Zeitung on Monday.
The Social Democrats want the ban extended until the spring and then brought to the table again in six months, the newspaper reported.
“How are we to carry out deportations without having diplomatic relations? There are no direct flights to Syria,” Maier said.
Torture and death
A spokeswoman for the foreign ministry, which will present an updated report on the humanitarian situation in Syria for the interior ministers’ conference, described conditions in the country as “catastrophic”.
Syrians continue to be “exposed to dangers when they return” to their home country and a government that “continues to act ruthlessly”, she said.
Government forces have regained control of large swathes of territory once held by rebels and Islamist groups, but opponents of the Assad government still face torture and death, according to human rights organizations.
Some German campaign groups have called for a general ban on deportations during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Many countries of origin of asylum seekers have ailing health care systems and are not in a position to care for those suffering from the virus,” the Pro Asyl group said on Monday.
Syria’s war, which broke out after the brutal suppression of anti-government protests in 2011, has killed more than 380,000 people and displaced millions from their homes.
The far right has often accused Merkel of having contributed to the Islamist threat in Germany by leaving the country’s borders open to more than one million migrants in 2015-16.
She has described her policy at the time as a “unique” response to an “extraordinary humanitarian situation”.