People who are persecuted politically (ie by the state) in their country of origin have a right to asylum in Germany; it is a fundamental right under Article 16a of the Basic Law. According to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees is politically persecuted and therefore entitled to asylum, who due to
- Race (as defined in the Geneva Convention)
- nationality
- political conviction
- basic religious decisions or
- Belonging to a particular social group
in the case of return to the country of origin will be exposed to a serious human rights violation.
Asylum seekers can also receive three additional forms of protection in their proceedings: Refugee protection under the Geneva Refugee Convention, subsidiary protection and deportation prohibition. The forms of protection have different requirements and are associated with different rights for further stay in Germany.
Who can resort to this fundamental right?
Asylum applications can only be filed in Germany. It is not possible to invoke the fundamental right who enters from an EU state or another safe third country, because these countries implement the Geneva Refugee Convention. "Asylum" in the sense used by Friedrich Merz, that is, as a politically persecuted, gets in Germany almost nobody.
Only a very small proportion of the refugees actually receive asylum under clause 16a. Of the 186,886 decisions of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees this year, only 2403 cases were granted asylum status, which is 1.3 percent. In total, 34 percent of asylum seekers receive a positive decision, but in the majority of cases a protection status under the Geneva Refugee Convention is granted.
What goal did the authors pursue with the fundamental right to asylum?
In response to the hitherto unknown dimensions of flight and persecution triggered by the Nazi dictatorship and the Second World War, the United Nations first established an individual asylum law in 1948 in the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights". Against the background of experiences with political persecution in the "Third Reich", the Federal Republic of Germany anchored this right in the Basic Law in 1949. In Article 16, paragraph 2, sentence 2, it said: "Politically persecuted enjoy asylum." The constitution thus guaranteed an enforceable individual right to asylum.
As the number of asylum seekers rose sharply in the early 1990s, the asylum-based bill increasingly came under fire, leading to the so-called asylum compromise in 1993: the Union, the FDP and the SPD introduced a constitutional amendment, stating that foreigners arriving via a safe third country were no longer entitled to asylum , In addition, Article 16a of the Basic Law, which has since become valid, stipulates that people from "safe countries of origin" in which there is no threat of persecution or inhumane treatment are not entitled to asylum.