Deportations to Greece: Federal Administrative Court agrees

The Federal Administrative Court classifies deportations of single, healthy and workable migrants to Greece as permitted. Despite defects in the Greek recording system, this non -vulnerable group of people does not do an extreme need in the country, the court in Leipzig decided on Wednesday. It demonstrated the complaints of an stateless man from northern Gaza Strip and a Somalier. (Az.: BVerwG 1 C 18.24 and 1 C 19.24)

The men had left their homeland in 2017 and 2018. They entered Greece via Turkey. There they were granted international refugee protection and they received a temporary residence permit. The refugees later traveled to Germany and again made asylum applications.

The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees rejected the applications as inadmissible and ordered the deportation back to Greece. In contrast, the men filed a complaint. They were unsuccessful in the lower courts. The Hessian Administrative Court (VGH) assumed that in Greece they do not threaten the risk of inhuman or humiliating treatment with considerable probability.

Other courts had assessed the situation in Greece more critically. For this reason, Germany has not been pushed back to Greece to a large extent from Germany. Refugee organizations such as Pro Asylum still criticize that migrants in Greece are facing a miserable situation. Bureaucratic processes blocked access to fundamental rights.

The federal judges confirmed the assessment of the Hessian VGH. The yardstick is whether the migrants in Greece are available “bread, bed and soap”, said judge Robert Keller. “It’s not much, we know that too. It is a tough scale.” According to the Senate, the living conditions in the southern European country are not the case that people in their rights are violated from the EU fundamental rights charta. Asylum applications of single, healthy protectionists are therefore likely to be rejected.

After a return to Greece, people would have to fight through a jungle of agency, according to the federal judges. However, it is possible to find accommodation. Also access to food and work can be found – be it through soup kitchens and the so -called shadow economy.

Pro asylum did not understand the court’s decision. “We come to a different assessment of the situation,” said speaker Andreas Meyerhöfer. “We know that people inevitably end up in the impairing.” If more people were now deported to Greece again, the situation will still be tightened.