In 2014, John O. (not his real name) received a letter informing him that his application for asylum had been rejected. John O., then 41, is from Nigeria. At that point, he had already been living in Germany for three years.

The immigration authority wants to deport John O. — but it can’t, because he has no passport. He says it was stolen. There’s no way of sending someone back to Nigeria from Bavaria without travel documents.

"His exceptional leave to remain keeps being extended, one month at a time," his lawyer Lother Panzer told DW. Panzer provides legal advice for asylum seekers, including John O. "Every month he has to go to the authorities and make sure he gets it renewed."

John O. is one of the hundreds of thousands of foreigners living in Germany as rejected asylum seekers. There are various reasons why they haven’t been deported: because they’re sick, because there’s no safe way to return to their country of origin, because that country is at war, or because they’re considered to be stateless. Or, as with this Nigerian man, because they have no passport or ID.

Read more: Fewer deportations from Germany due to lack of travel documents

'Responses to applications are extremely rare'

According to the German interior ministry, 65,000 people who should have left Germany were granted exceptional leave to remain last year because they had no documents. That’s almost twice as many as the year before. This increase is related to the large numbers of refugees who arrived in 2015 and 2016, says Ernst Walter, the chairman of the German Police Union. The federal police are responsible for deporting those required to leave the country.

"However, it also has to do with the fact that more and more people are trying to disguise their identity to avoid the risk of being deported," Walter told DW. "And, as the authorities, our job is to establish the rule of law. Of course it can’t be that someone who throws away his passport and conceals his identity gets right of residence while the one who was honest is deported."

That’s why it’s important to clarify the origin and identity of rejected asylum seekers and get them surrogate passports, says Walter. He explains that the federal police are particularly well-placed to do this, because they’re constantly in touch with police forces in other countries, such as Morocco. According to an internal report by the Ministry of the Interior which has been quoted in newspapers of the Funke Media Group, cooperation with foreign authorities can often take a very long time. In India, the report says, processing of surrogate passport applications is "sometimes very slow to non-existent;" in Pakistan it is "delayed," while in Lebanon "responses to applications are extremely rare."

Read more: Germany's future interior minister Horst Seehofer vows to increase deportations

Pressure from Berlin

This is why the Ministry of the Interior wants to up the pressure on countries of origin if they are uncooperative — particularly because a lack of documents is currently the most common reason why people are granted exceptional leave to remain. Their leverage here could be "development aid policy, it could be visa policy," says Johannes Dimroth, a ministry spokesman. They want to explore "all possibilities in the bilateral relationship." After all, he points out, countries of origin are obliged to take their citizens back.

So will Germany cut development aid if countries don’t issue passports to people on Germany’s deportation list? Ideas like these do not find favor at the Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development. It would rather focus on introducing positive incentives. The minister, Gerd Müller (CSU) has announced that up to €500 million ($616 million) a year will be used to finance jobs and traineeships for returnees to Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan and other countries. He hopes this will convince 20,000 to 30,000 asylum seekers a year to return voluntarily.

 Germany deports more rejected Afghan asylum seekers

Countries have a duty to cooperate

Not every foreigner without a passport has deliberately destroyed it. Smugglers often take refugees’ documents off them, says Claus-Ulrich Prölss, the head of the Cologne Refugee Council. He explains that some people also destroy their documents at the beginning of their journey, because they fear the police or the military in their own country: Eritrea, for example.

"Of course a person should and must present their passport if they have one, so their identity is established right from the start," Prölss told DW. "A passport alone is not sufficient reason enough to deport someone; there have to be others." Prölss also warns asylum seekers not to give the police false information about themselves. That could backfire, if not immediately, then later on, when they’re well integrated and should be getting residency rights. "That’s when people often come in to the advice centers and say they switched the letters in their name, or changed their date of birth. And that’s a problem, because in many cases deceiving the authorities about your identity will disqualify you from obtaining the right of residence."

If they’ve lost their passport, an asylum seeker must help the authorities to obtain a new one and clarify their identity. If they don’t fulfill their obligation to cooperate, the authorities then have the right to search their cellphone or their home and impose penalties. John O. received a penalty order "for failing to cooperate in the acquisition of papers." He lodged an appeal, but last week the district court decided nonetheless to impose a €700 fine, which is a lot of money for him. In the meantime he has been to the Nigerian embassy and applied for a new passport.

Author: Peter Hille

April 2, 2018

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