Thousands of migrants in Germany have been waiting so long for their first asylum processing interview they have taken to the courts to speed up the system, a situation described by critics as “organised government failure”.
According to figures from the German Ministry of the Interior, at the end of 2015 some 2,229 ‘failure to act’ cases against the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) were lodged by migrants in the administrative courts in relation to sluggish asylum processing, reports Thüringer Allgemeine.
‘Failure to act’ cases can be lodged against government offices if no decision is made within a reasonable time following a complaint.
The BAMF figures were given in a parliamentary answer to a question asked by Sevim Dağdelen, a German politician of Turkish origin who is a member of the Left Party.
According to the Parliamentary State Secretary to the Federal Minister for the Interior — Günter Krings — of the total submitted the lion’s share came from four countries: 560 from Afghanistan; 337 from Iraq; a further 217 from Eritrea; and 207 from Syria.
Ms. Dağdelen lays the blame firmly at the door of the German government and the reintroduction of case-by-case assessments for Syrian migrants. She said:
“The federal government imposed increasingly senseless work on the already overworked BAMF, and thereby prolonged the asylum process.
“This is unacceptable and illegal, leading to an increasing number of ‘failure to act’ cases, which means extra work again. This is organised government failure.”
In its defence the Ministry of the Interior points to the fact it employed 40 per cent more people last year, and opened 20 new offices. In addition it reformed aspects of asylum processing with efficiency gains meaning more than twice as many decisions were made in 2015 (282 726) as the previous year (128,911).