Although he was in church asylum, a refugee in Hamburg was deported. His asylum application was previously rejected.
He sought refuge in a Catholic parish, but now the refugee was deported anyway: According to the Hamburg interior authorities, a 29-year-old Afghan returned to Sweden on Monday morning. The deportation despite church asylum is causing discussions.
The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) had previously rejected the examination of individual hardships. The Hamburg immigration authority is only an enforcement authority and has to take over the return transfer, it said.
According to the information, the 29-year-old initially lived with relatives in Sweden after leaving Afghanistan nine years ago and applied for asylum there. It was rejected. That’s why the man came to Germany in the spring of this year. A new application was rejected by the BAMF due to a lack of responsibility. The man then went to church asylum in the summer.
The bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Northern Church, Kirsten Fehrs, is appalled by the authorities’ actions. “The deportation of a young man from a Catholic Church asylum in Hamburg fills me with great concern. Church asylum is not a frivolous decision, but a form of humanitarian protection,” said Fehrs. She is the current council chairwoman of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD).
Parishes grant this protection after careful examination if they see serious deficiencies or a danger to life and limb in the implementation of the asylum law. In the past few weeks there have been repeated cases nationwide in which state authorities have violated church asylum. “As churches, we will continue to work together to ensure that church asylum remains as a last resort in the spirit of humane asylum practice.”
The aim of church asylum is for refugees to gain the right to remain in Germany. Sacred spaces have a centuries-old tradition of protection. However, the refugees rarely live directly in the church, rather in the parish hall or rectory or other rooms. There they are largely protected from police access because the German state generally respects church asylum.
The left-wing faction of the Hamburg citizenship criticized the eviction of the church asylum as an absolute breach of taboo. “I wouldn’t have thought it possible that this could happen in Hamburg. The church’s decision to give a person asylum must not be affected. There should be no deportations from church asylum,” said Carola Ensslen, refugee policy spokeswoman for the Left parliamentary group according to the announcement.
Church asylum must be respected as socially recognized protection, even if it is not a real asylum in the legal sense. “I expect Interior Senator Andy Grote to make a binding promise to the churches that something like this will not happen again.”
