The Afghan national’s case came to Germany’s Higher Regional Court in Frankfurt (Oberslandesgericht Frankfurt am Main, OLG Frankfurt), after the man in question was arrested on a European arrest warrant, issued by Greece at Frankfurt airport in February 2025.

The German court had to decide whether or not to allow the man to be sent back to Greece to face the sentence, for which he was tried in absentia in October 2024. The Frankfurt court decided on Tuesday (April 22) that in fact the Afghan man could be sent back to Greece, and that there were no human rights grounds that could prevent this deportation.

According to information from the Greek courts in 2020, the Afghan man allegedly used his German residence permit and an Afghan passport belonging to a relative to allow a third Afghan man to enter Germany. Although the passport was not fake, it didn’t belong to the man in question, but to a relative, reported Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung.

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Tried in absentia in Greece

In October 2024, the Afghan man’s case came to trial in Greece and he ended up being tried in absentia by a court in Thessaloniki and sentenced to a six-year prison sentence. According to the latest German judgement, the man should still have to serve his sentence in full and so can be sent back to Greece in order to do so.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that the suspect took the documents to Greece to allow another Afghan, who had traveled without the correct papers from Turkey to Greece, to continue his journey on to Austria.

The Greek police however suspected that the man was trying to perpetrate a scam when they checked his papers at Thessaloniki airport.

According to the German press agency dpa, the man originally traveled to Germany without the correct papers in 2016 and his asylum application was later refused. However, he ended up staying in Germany because Germany had placed a ban on deportations to Afghanistan on humanitarian grounds.

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Returned to Greece

The German court added that the man had not established enough connections in Germany to argue that he should remain in the country and not be sent back to Greece. Falsifying documents is also a crime in Germany, and so he could be tried in a German court if he had not already been issued with a sentence in Greece, reported the French news agency Agence France Presse (AFP).

The Frankfurt court judgement also added that the temporary ban on deportation for Afghans only related to being sent back to Afghanistan, reported AFP. The man, through his illegal actions, had proved that it was possible for him to travel to other countries, including Greece, and therefore he could be sent back there to sit out his sentence there. His temporary residency in Germany does not protect him "against deportation in accordance with the regulations on international legal assistance in criminal matters," stated the court judgement.

The decision of the court cannot be appealed, stated a press release from the Frankfurt OLG.

The decision comes just a week after another German court (the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig) decided that overall, migrants who had already begun a process of asylum in Greece, and then traveled to Germany to start a second application could be sent back to Greece under the Dublin rules, and without fear of mistreatment or an infringement of their human rights.

The German government has been working on increasing the number of returns to Greece and announced it had made progress on this issue in March.