The decision of the Aliens Registration Office on illegitimate asylum petitions should be a preliminary decision in connection with the issuance of measures to end the asylum seeker’s stay. It should be noted that a legitimate petition for asylum can also be proven obviously unfounded during the course of the proceedings of the Federal Office, in accordance with its sound knowledge of the [applicant’s] country of origin and in view of its specific experience in assessing asylum petitions. The desired expansion of the competency of the Aliens Registration Office should only involve the employment of a preliminary “obviousness” filter.
The Aliens Registration Agency decides in the end if it is doubtless that a petition for asylum will be rejected in the absence of further investigation. In any case, there is the usual legal protection against measures by the Aliens Registration Agency to end a petitioner’s stay. If the court deems the asylum petition (also in an expedited proceeding) to be legitimate, it should be transferred to the Federal Office without delay. Also, any obstacles to deportation that are directly related to protection of human dignity are considered. Such expedited legal proceedings should be completed within two months of the date of the issuance of the measures to end the applicant’s stay. This cannot be accomplished by more complex proceedings through the Federal Office, even if an application had been rejected there as obviously unfounded. Precisely such an acceleration of proceedings would serve to deter asylum abuse. The fact that the Federal Constitutional Court’s decision points to this route should ease the political discussion.
[ . . . ]
Things will get worse if the developing avalanche of asylum abuse cases is not effectively halted. Augsburg Bishop [Josef] Stimpfle imagines a mass migration of peoples heading for the European Community, “such that the world has never seen before.” During a mass, he said that in the next thirty years about 120 million Arabs, Africans, and Asians will have to be integrated into the economic and cultural sphere of the European Community. Already today, he said, a “wave of desperate people seeking work” is moving from the Third World toward the affluent countries.
Source: Helmut Riepl, “People Seeking Work are not Eligible for Asylum” [“Arbeitssuchende sind nicht asylberechtigt”], Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 10, 1989.
Translation: Allison Brown
print version
return to list
previous document