Thousands of
Ukrainian asylum seekers are facing deportation from Germany in the near
future, according to the German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau.
German authorities
may deport thousands of Ukrainian asylum seekers in the immediate
future if Berlin recognizes Ukraine as a "safe country
of origin", the German
newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau reported.
The newspaper recalled that earlier, more
than 7,000 Ukrainians had applied for asylum in Germany due
to the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine.
"In recent weeks, many of them received
notifications of refusal. They entered Germany using Schengen visas, which, in turn, are subject to the Dublin agreement. Their
applications should be considered by those EU countries which issued the
visas," the newspaper said.
According to Frankfurter Rundschau, a positive
decision on asylum was made with respect to only 5.3 percent
of the requests, with every refusal accompanied by a requirement
to leave the country.
The newspaper also recalled that politicians
from Germany's ruling Christian
Democratic Party (CDU)
demanded last week that Berlin should recognize Ukraine as a "safe
country of origin".
"Already now, Ukrainian asylum seekers are very seldom being recognized as refugees on German
territory," Frankfurter Rundschau said.
German laws currently allow for migrants to be
sent back to their countries of origin if they have been convicted
of a crime that carries a prison sentence of three or more years, and
only when the situation in their country of origin is deemed safe
for them to go back.
German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said last
week that the government wanted to ease deportation barriers in cases
where asylum seekers are jailed for violent crimes like bodily harm,
homicide, rape, and sexual assault. The German government came
under pressure over its open-door policy toward refugees
after a series of sex attacks on women by mostly Middle Eastern asylum seekers hit German
cities on New Year’s Eve.
According to the German news
network Deutsche Welle,
in 2014, the number of asylum applications filed by Ukrainians
stood at 2,703; in 2015, the figure increased to about 4,440.
However, this number is relatively minuscule: according to International
Business Times, a total of 1.1 million people were registered
as asylum-seekers in Germany in 2015, most of them
from war-torn countries such as Syria, Libya and Iraq.
While German officials often claim that the Ukrainian
conflict is limited to a small portion of the country and that
refugees can seek asylum elsewhere within Ukraine, a different set
of standards is applied to Syria, despite the fact that
over 6.5 million displaced Syrians are living in refugee facilities
in areas controlled by the government of Bashar Assad, according
to the website of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
Many young Syrian men have travelled abroad simply
to avoid being drafted into the army; this is part of the reason
Europeans have often characterized the refugees as being primarily young
adult men.
According to The Guardian, hundreds
of thousands of Ukrainians have successfully sought refuge
in Russia since the Donbass conflict erupted following the
overthrow of former president Viktor Yanukovych in February, 2014.
Source: Sputnik News 20-01-2016
