Germany moves forward with plan to screen asylum applications abroad

The German government is to review whether asylum application processing can be outsourced to third countries, according to a series of measures designed to curb irregular migration agreed on Tuesday (7 October).

Following dramatic late-night negotiations at a coordination summit with the heads of German states, Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced in the early hours of Tuesday that the federal government had agreed to review the feasibility of the policy alongside a number of other steps.

“We have agreed on a review, which I support, because there is no idea that we should not carefully consider and make a decision on,” Scholz told reporters in Berlin, calling the summit’s outcome “a historical moment”.

The government also pledged to ban asylum applicants from receiving regular welfare benefits for three years after their arrival and agreed to make funding for the accommodation of irregular migrants more responsive to the needs of regional states. It also affirmed its commitment to tighter controls at the EU’s external and internal borders.

Externalising the processing of asylum applications is a move already made by other G7 countries. The UK has been working on relocating asylum applicants to Rwanda for more than a year while Italy announced a deal to accommodate irregular migrants in Albania on Monday.

Such policies are controversial due to human rights concerns, which have seen the British legislation remain stuck in court.

The German agreement came after intensive lobbying from opposition lawmakers and the FDP, Scholz’s junior coalition partner. While agreeing to the review, the Chancellor remained sceptical about the feasibility of the proposal, pointing out that “it’s not so easy” to find countries to which application processes can be outsourced.

Its implementation would also be a bitter pill to swallow for the pro-migration Greens, the third member of the coalition.

For now, the party insisted that Tuesday’s agreement requires nothing more than a review, which it had pledged to back in the coalition agreement.

The prospect of implementation was “completely unrealistic” as it would violate international law, the Greens’ speaker on migration, Julian Pahlke, told Euractiv.

The FDP, which supports screening applications abroad, had previously raised the prospect that the policy could be implemented within the boundaries of international human rights law. However, Pahlke argued that the policy required asylum applicants to be returned to countries in which they might be subjected to poor conditions, which he claims would pose a breach of human rights requirements.

While the outcome of a judicial review remains uncertain, legal challenges would be likely.

“Instead of finding actual solutions, the debates centre on legally and practically unrealistic paths, that radicalise the tone and produce sham solutions,” Pahlke concluded.

Dramatic negotiations

However, some have questioned the impetus behind the move. Reports by German media during the summit highlighted contentious power plays within Germany’s largest opposition party, the centre-right CDU, casting doubt over whether the proposal for the review stemmed chiefly from genuine policy concerns or internal party politics.

Behind closed doors, Chancellor Scholz reportedly accused CDU regional ministers of a coup against the CDU leadership as they had decided at the last minute to include the policy on a new list of demands for the summit, which deviated from the original demands presented by CDU leader Friedrich Merz, causing a delay to the meeting.

Notably, it was Hendrik Wüst, the CDU prime minister of the state of North Rhine Westphalia, who re-initiated the debate around outsourcing asylum applications last week. Wüst is said to be eyeing the party’s nomination to run for chancellor in 2025, which would pit him against Merz.

“If Friedrich Merz had been able to dictate our demands, they might have been different,” Boris Rhein, the CDU chair of the conference of the regional heads of state, told reporters ahead of the meeting, admitting that screening asylum applications in third countries was “mainly a concern of the prime minister of North Rhine Westphalia”.

While Rhein praised the final outcome on Tuesday, Merz slammed it as insufficiently concrete, announcing that any collaboration with the government on migration was now “over”.

[Edited by Nathalie Weatherald/Benjamin Fox]

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