- The number of asylum seekers in Germany has risen sharply. In order to reduce this number, the government wants to take stronger action against illegal migration.
- As the Ministry of the Interior has announced, there will currently be no stationary controls at the border with Poland and the Czech Republic.
- However, from now on the German Federal Police will carry out additional, flexible checks there.
- In contrast to stationary ones, these do not have to be applied for to the EU Commission.
“We absolutely have to stop the smugglers’ cruel business, because they are putting people’s lives at risk for maximum profit,” said German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) in Berlin. That’s why “additional flexible priority checks are being carried out on the smuggling routes at the borders with Poland and the Czech Republic,” said the SPD politician.
The new controls are a supplement to the situation-oriented identity checks, she explained at a meeting of the Interior Committee in the German Bundestag. In general, care is taken to ensure that regular commuter traffic is not affected.
People who do not come here for humanitarian reasons must be deported more quickly.
There have been stationary controls at the German border with Austria since autumn 2015. These temporary controls must be regularly notified to the EU Commission.
But no stationary checks
As the Tagesschau Deutschland reported on its online portal, the spokesman for the Interior Ministry announced on Monday that it would examine stationary and joint controls on both sides of the border with Poland and the Czech Republic.
The German police union then spoke out against stationary border controls. They are “not effective” in police work. The strict controls meant, among other things, that smugglers would simply avoid them. Instead, the federal police want to be able to act “agilely on the border line”.
Call for stationary border controls
Due to the increased number of asylum seekers, various Christian Democratic state interior ministers (CDU/CSU) had asked Faeser to request stationary controls at the borders with the Czech Republic and Poland. However, anyone who requests asylum at the border cannot, as a rule, be turned away straight away, even during stationary border controls.
“People who do not come here for humanitarian reasons and have no prospect of staying must be deported more quickly,” said German Federal Justice Minister Marco Buschmann (FDP). He advocated that asylum procedures should be conducted in third countries.
However, the German government has not yet pursued such plans. So far, no state outside the EU has offered to temporarily accept asylum seekers until their procedure is completed.