Court agrees with Seehofer: Federal Ministry of the Interior may prohibit Berlin from accepting refugees from Moria – Berlin
The fact that the Federal Ministry of the Interior prohibited the state of Berlin from taking in 300 people from the Greek Moria refugee camp who were particularly worthy of protection in the summer of 2020 was right. That was decided by the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig on Tuesday.
The Berlin Senate announced in 2020 that it intended to take in a total of 300 asylum seekers from the heavily overburdened refugee camps on the Greek islands in the capital. The death was justified with the desolate humanitarian conditions, especially in the Moria camp on Lesbos, which has since burned down.
At the end of July 2020, the then Federal Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer (CSU) officially forbade the state of Berlin to take in any more refugees. In a letter to the Australian interior senator Andreas Geisel (SPD), Seehofer said he could not agree to the state admissions program for legal reasons.
Specifically, the requirements for a state admission order are not met and national uniformity is not maintained. The admission by the state of Berlin is also not consistent with the measures taken by the federal government itself.
In November 2020, the Berlin Senate announced that it would take legal action against the Federal Ministry of the Interior based on this decision. The Federal Administrative Court, which is responsible for administrative disputes between the federal and state governments, has now dismissed this lawsuit. “The refusal of consent to the order was lawful,” said the Federal Administrative Court.
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The reason given was, among other things, that Berlin’s admission order would have led to a different legal status of people from the same Greek refugee camp in Germany. “Because the persons admitted by the federal government only received a residence permit to carry out an asylum procedure with an open outcome,” according to the court.
“The humanitarian admission intended by the plaintiff, on the other hand, would have led to the immediate granting of a longer-term residence permit, initially limited to three years, without the need for protection having been checked beforehand with regard to the respective country of origin.”