Twenty migrants have sued the Berlin State Office for Health and Social Affairs because they had to wait more than a week to register their asylum cases and receive welfare handouts. They are demanding instant payment.
Germany is struggling to cope with the 1.5 million migrants it expects to absorb this year and those arriving in Berlin often have to wait days if not weeks to be registered at asylum centres.
The group of twenty who have decided to sue claim they have had to wait more than a week. Their “urgent application” has been confirmed by a court spokesman, Die Welt reports.
The court spokesman said the plaintiffs were seeking to “put pressure on the authorities” by bringing the case, and the court would issue a ruling in the coming days. The spokesman said that the incident was just one of several similar legal cases brought by migrants over the past two weeks.
“We can do it!” proclaimed German Chancellor Angela Merkel in reference to the migrant influx at the beginning of September. However, just this morning, it was announced that the nation would be extending temporary border controls until the end of October, AFP reports.
Border controls were first implemented on September 17th, just weeks after Mrs Merkel promised to keep the door open for any Syrian migrant who could make it to Germany, on the 25th of August.
“The situation at the border is such that we cannot do without them,” a ministry spokeswoman told AFP. “We need to return to an orderly handling of refugee policy.”
In the southern state of Bavaria, through which the majority of migrants travelling via the Balkans and Austria pass, state premier Horst Seehofer proposed setting up “transit zones” for migrants to be held in as their asylum claims are assessed.
The centre-left Social Democrats, partners in Merkel’s coalition government, argued that they would amount to “large detention centres in no-mans land.”
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