(Adnkronos) – The German government will have to evaluate visas for Afghans on a case-by-case basis and recognize the individual concerns of the foreign citizen concerned, regardless of the dismantling of the special admission program “Human Rights List”, related to the granting of residence permits to Afghan citizens, carried out by the executive. This is established by the latest ruling of the German Federal Constitutional Court, which impacts a politically very relevant area in Germany, where the arrival or deportation of Afghan citizens is a much-discussed topic and that of migration is becoming increasingly politically delicate, given the rise of the far-right and anti-migrant party AfD.
The case concerned an Afghan woman, an applicant and an individual particularly at risk from the Taliban due to her advocacy for women’s rights in Afghanistan, who had requested entry visas for herself and her two young children and is currently in Pakistan, in a shelter managed by the German government. They had received a commitment of admission from Germany in 2021 but it was revoked last December. The Higher Administrative Court of Berlin-Brandenburg had initially denied that there was a right to visas, but the Constitutional Court overturned that decision, asserting that the lower court had misinterpreted the scope of the general constitutional prohibition of arbitrariness deriving from the German Constitution, known as the Basic Law.
The body has therefore referred the matter back to the Berlin court, which will have to issue a new decision on the applications. According to the judges of the Constitutional Court, it must be assumed that, based on the Constitution, Germany is obliged to continue supporting the woman and her children in Pakistan until a visa is issued or until the Ministry of Interior issues a constitutionally compliant declaration that the admission program does not apply. Until then, the German state must continue to cooperate with the Pakistani government to ensure that the applicants are not arrested and are not deported to Afghanistan, the ruling states. According to the NGO Society for Civil Rights (Gff), the current case is one of 31 complaints filed as part of a class action through the Gff itself, and the decision could “change the fate of about 400 other Afghans”. In the event of a negative ruling, the body states, the woman would be deported to Afghanistan and consequently risk “imprisonment, torture, and death”.
