(Deutsche Welle) Germany’s current general deportation stop to Syria should not be extended, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said Friday, urging that individual case-by-case decisions be made “at least for criminals and those considered a threat.”
In 2012, Germany passed a ban on deportations to war-torn Syria, regularly debating it and extending it based on periodic Foreign Ministry assessments. Currently, nearly 6,000 Syrians face not-exercised deportations.
The murder of a tourist in Dresden in October, allegedly by a radicalized Syrian Islamist who lost his refugee status in 2019, rekindled calls to expel.
On Friday, Seehofer told news agency dpa that he would press at a December meeting of interior ministers of Germany’s 16 regional states that case-by-case expulsions proceed.