Arab language program of German public TV broadcaster explains migrants how they can avoid deportation

Legally binding self-anhiliation

Just a few days ago, Germany's regional public broadcaster WDR came under heavy fire for a children's song with Green propaganda lyrics. The shitstorm against WDR because of it is not over yet as a new piece of their program is making the rounds. It's about an interview with a journalist explaining how asylum seekers can avoid deportation from Germany.

The interview is part of WDR's new Arabic language program which has been established in 2016 following the influx of more than one million migrants mostly from Arab countries to Germany. In the interview, journalist Isabel Schayani, who was born in Iran but grew up in Germany, talks about a verdict by the EU Court of Justice which marks a loophole for migrants to stay in Germany with a 90% success rate.

According to Schayani, the verdict says that everyone who applied for asylum in Germany and is registered as a resident in Germany for at least six months must not be deported to another EU member state. This undermines a rule of the Dublin Regulation after which the asylum system for most of the EU members is organized by. According to its rules, asylum seekers must apply for asylum in the first EU country they are entering, which is usually Greece, Italy or Spain who mark the EU's southern border.

The rule itself is well known in public as it has been widely criticized. Despite this rule and the known points of entry for most migrants many migrants are being sent directly to Northern Europe without asking for aslyum when reaching EU soil. Southern European countries argued that they are overwhealmed by the influx which promted them to ignore asylum applications and directly put migrants into busses and trains to Germany.

With the mentioned verdict, the EU court effectively legalized this technically illegal practice as it stops legal actions to reverse the process.

When gaming the system becomes the newsworthy information

The interviewer, a headscard wearing Arab woman reiterates Schayani's words in Arabic for her viewers, most of whom probably know already about this trick. Schayani then explains that the verdict has been spoken because of an Iranian national and explains: "When you enter Greece [as the Iranian man] and then you travel to Germany to apply for asylum, then the law says that you have to be deported back to Greece." If though "the asylum process takes more than six months you won't be sent back anymore." The Iranian who promted the verdict entered the EU in Greece and then travelled on one of the first main migrant route through Bulgaria and Hungary to Austria.

Austria then tried to deport him to Bulgaria, which Bulgaria accepted. The Iranian though apparently didn't like the outlook to receive Bulgarian aid instead of Austrian money and sued. The court then ruled in his favor and decided that his asylum application has to be finished in Austria, because he already spent more than six months in the country.

Schayani then goes on and explains that in the first quarter of 2019, there were more than 11,000 cases of this kind in Germany with asylum applicants who should have been deported to other EU countries. At the end though only 1,300 people have been deported as Schayani states. Thanks to the verdict, 90% of all applicants could stay in Germany. Schayani ends her explanation with: "So, that was the news. We found it to be important that you know about it."

Other loopholes for migrants and the EU court as a political institution

For context it is important to note that asylum applications can take up to severa years in Germany. There are cases in which asylum applicants lived in the system for more than a decade. In the past, usually women used the loophole of getting pregnant to extent their stay in the country, but there were also other means like witholding information, repeated legal complaints by sympathetic asylum lawyers or even crimes on which a sentence in the needed duration follows. Foreign criminals can only be deported when their sentence was at least five years in prison.

With the mass influx since 2015 and the complete overwhealming of the institutions responsible for asylum and migration, the situation changed completely. Besides the already existing loopholes, the average asylum application currently takes six months to be processed as Die Zeit reports. They also state that this duration could only be reached by 2019 with both less asylum applications than in previous years and the system being ramped up to the increased demand. In 2018, the average duration for an asylum process with roughly 20% more applications was still nine months.

As critics would argue, the duration of six months from the verdict could be the result of the knowledge that the asylum process takes that long. It as long been common knowledge that the EU court is not a court in the legal sense and not dominated by legal experts, but very politicized and occupied by politicians who happen to be lawyers and are "convinced Europeans", as a quote of Koen Lenaerts, the president of the EU court, on his Wikipedia page states.

Verdicts by the EU court therefore are usually biased to further the interests of the EU as a whole and at the same moment directed against the interests of single EU member states.