Bamf stops all decisions on asylum applications from Syrians

The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bamf) is temporarily stopping all decisions on asylum applications from people from Syria. A spokesman for the authority said this upon request. The “Spiegel” first reported on Monday afternoon.

According to “Spiegel”, the Bamf is currently processing around 47,000 asylum applications from Syrians, whose processing is now on hold. The situation in Syria is confusing and what will happen politically there is too difficult to predict, the magazine quoted the spokesman as saying. Therefore, no serious assessments can be made at the moment. Otherwise every decision would be “on feet of clay”.

A few hours after the fall of ruler Assad in Syria, calls for a rapid return of Syrians to their home country had already become loud in German politics – but in which direction the country will develop is still completely unclear. The security situation in the country of origin always plays a role in asylum applications, said a Bamf spokesman. These are always individual decisions. In practice, the processing stop means that corresponding applications are “sorted down the stack and other asylum decisions are brought forward.”

In total, around a million people with Syrian citizenship live in the Federal Republic, and hundreds of thousands have fled the civil war that has raged since 2011. Most of the Syrians received so-called subsidiary protection in this country. In this case, those affected must be at risk of serious harm from either state or non-state actors in their home country.

Sources: AFP news agency