The Appeals Story

Focus (the German news publication, similar to 'Newsweek') did a brief 12-line piece today over a topic which is slowly moving up to be a top ten issue within the Bundestag (the German Parliament).

The subject?  Legal challenges on failed asylum applications. 

You see...if you were a migrant or immigrant in Germany....you have to submit an application, with some varying amount of evidence over who you are, your reason for migrating, and your background.  A review occurs....taking weeks to months, then some German authority makes the decision.  If you fail, you'd typically leave within a period of time....well, unless you filed a legal challenge to the asylum application.

Right now (at least as of 1 January)....the Germans were willing to admit that there are now 360,000 asylum challenges filed and in the court system.

Neither the government or journalists will speak much about this, but you could sit and imagine some application taking a minimum of one year....maybe even up to two years to be heard.  But then....the judge might go and ask for paperwork or more evidence.....taking anywhere from a couple of weeks, to a couple of months, and onto another year or two.  With various challenges, one after another....you could imagine some guy standing there with a failed visa, and using the court system for five to ten years to delay things. 

All of this has caught some public interest, and frankly....gotten judges a bit intimidated.  No one says much over the calendars of these judges, but you'd have to go and guess that some folks have a full calendar laid out for the next two years. 

Adding to this conflict is the fact that the agency making this decision....rests in Nuremberg.  So you are dragging some case-officer off his regular work, and requiring him to stand in front of a judge and explain how he came to such-and-such decision.  You can figure that case-officer will have waste at least two days minimum in lining up his paperwork, and reviewed his decision a second time....then be challenged by some judge for failing to take into consideration X, Y or Z.

So Focus says....the federal government (with Chancellor Merkel leading this) wants a discussion with the prime ministers of each state (16 of them). They all want to modify procedural law.  They don't want this to be a long delayed process.  The solution?  It's not clearly defined in this article.  No one wants to hire more judges because they see this coming to reduced phase.

One gets the impression that they'd like to go and bring in retired judges for a year, and wipe out the bulk of these applications or appeals. 

My suggestion would be to create and hire up twenty-odd judges out of the Nuremberg and the only thing that they'd ever do is judge over applications.  I'd take the whole application process away from the states and just make this one national or federal process. 

Course, you might sit and wonder....how did the 360,000 folks fail?  That's the funny side of this story.....you don't know.  Were they false identification situations?  Well....you just don't know.  The fact that the government really doesn't discuss this, and the news folks don't seem to want to know....would lead to wonder about the quantity here (360,000) and what failed these folks.