11.06.2014 Controversy over “safe countries of origin”

On the occasion of the current political debate in the German federal council on declaring of Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia as safe countries of origin, Baeck (2014) reports on a demonstration in Bremen. All the federal states have to agree to the request. The protesters called the Bremer members of parliament to reject the application. This application is said to affect especially weak, vulnerable migrants, and to undermine the fundamental right to asylum: “The project is motivated by “racism” and “antiziganism”, said a speaker at the rally yesterday. In fact, people should be deterred to come to Germany by law. This is justified by rising numbers of asylum seekers and a low acceptance rate for people from these countries: In the first four months in 2014, a fifth of all first asylum applications came from people from Serbia, Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina – 6,682 of 32,949 applications. If the three states (along with Ghana and Senegal) are declared as “safe”, the asylum procedure is shortened. To prove individual prosecution would become more difficult, asylum applications would be considered to be “evidently unfounded.”” Critics see it as particularly problematic that the new draft law recognises the social exclusion of the Rroma, but at the same time rejects their persecution. By this, the government is said to downplay the real situation on site. The reason for the increase in asylum applications from Southeast Europe is said to “be due to the social and societal problems of the Roma, but not because of a persecution of this group.”

The Green Party politician Claudia Roth criticized that it is extremely problematic to conclude on the basis of the definition of safe countries of origin that there is no real political persecution and exclusion. German interior minister Thomas de Maizière (CDU) sees this differently and refers to the support of the draft law through the German population. To which part of the population he refers to and how big this one is, remains unclear (Deutschlandfunk 2014). Wagner (2014) meanwhile reports on the case of a Macedonian Rroma-family, which was deported back to their country of origin in the middle of the night. The family became homeless and the father was charged for the „denigration of the Macedonian state“.