Historical record (October 2026): This article preserves two January 2019 news reports on German asylum-law proposals, with outcomes now known. The bill to classify Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Georgia as “safe countries of origin” was passed by the Bundestag on 18 January 2019 but never took effect — the Bundesrat did not approve it, and a new designation bill was still being introduced in July 2025 (BMI). Georgia was designated separately, effective 1 January 2024. The draft return law described below became the Geordnete-Rückkehr-Gesetz, passed by the Bundestag on 7 June 2019.
Bundestag classifies Maghreb states as ‘safe’ for refugee returns
In a bid to speed up deportations, the lower house of Germany’s parliament has voted to change the status of Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Georgia. But the new rules never took effect: the bill was not approved by the Bundesrat, so none of the four countries were classified as safe countries of origin under it. (Georgia was designated separately, effective 1 January 2024.)
The legislation changing Germany’s asylum law passed with the votes of the grand coalition of conservatives and Social Democrats, with the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the center-right Free Democrats also supporting the changes.
Under the proposed rules, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Georgia would have been presumed to be safe countries, making it very difficult for their nationals to apply for asylum in Germany. Introducing the legislation to the Bundestag, conservative Interior Minister Horst Seehofer argued that the amendments only acknowledged what was already a reality.
“Countries of safe return are those where refugees have a very remote chance of being granted asylum,” Seehofer told parliamentarians. “Classifying countries as such accelerates the asylum application process and allows us to terminate stays in Germany when applications are rejected.”
Seehofer pointed out that applications from the four countries in question had very low success rates, ranging from 2.3 percent in the case of Morocco to a mere 0.3 percent for Georgia. He also argued that the new rules would allow Germany to concentrate its asylum evaluations on those in need.
“That’s the deeper sense behind this legislation,” Seehofer said. “We can then devote more time, concentration and more energy to deal with applications from people truly needing protection and to integrate them into our society.”
But before that can happen, the government needs to the cooperation of a party that rejected Friday’s legislation.
Greens: ‘Government tricking the German people’
The vast major of laws with a widespread impact in Germany requires the approval of the upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat, which is made up of representatives of Germany’s 16 federal states. With the Greens forming parts of the government in nine of those states, they’re in a position to scupper the deal.
The left-leaning environmentalists joined the Left Party in emphatically rejected Seehofer’s proposed legislative changes in the Bundestag. They say the amended law would do nothing to improve Germany’s asylum procedures.
“I personally find the worst thing about this debate is that it tries to trick people in Germany into thinking that the reclassification of these four countries can potentially solve the problems we do indeed have with our asylum policies,” asylum affairs spokesman Luise Amtsberg.
Amtsberg added that the rule changes would only affect a “next to nonexistent” percentage of those people applying for protection in Germany. She pointed out that the number of applicants from the four countries in question had declined by 85 percent since 2016, while the number of deportations had risen by a factor of ten.
For example, 504 Algerians were deported in 2017 compared with only 57 in 2015 – that’s according to official Interior Ministry statistics. 1910 Algerians applied for asylum in Germany in 2017. Official numbers from the other two Maghreb states – Morocco and Tunisia – reflect the same trends.
“Stop trying to portray this issue as a question of Germany’s destiny,” Amtsberg told her Bundestag colleagues. “That’s simply not the case.
Wider implications for the political landscape
The disagreement between the government, led by Angela Merkel’s conservatives, and the Greens has political ramifications that go beyond asylum policy.
With the dwindling of support for the traditional heavyweight German political parties, the conservative CDU-CSU and the Social Democrats, it has become increasingly fashionable to speculate that the next government could be an alliance of conservatives and Greens.
So-called black-green coalitions are in place at the regional level in the states of Baden-Württemberg and Hessen, where the governments have drawn generally good reviews. And the two parties cooperate in governing coalitions in Saxony Anhalt and Schleswig-Holstein as well.
But Friday’s debate illustrated just how far apart conservatives and Greens remain on many national issues
“In what sense are you trying to persuade us to join you?” Amtsberg asked of conservative deputies. “You haven’t listened to a single one of our arguments.”
The Green Party leadership has signaled some willingness to compromise in the interest of speeding up deportations. A litmus test for whether common ground can be reached will come when the Bundesrat votes on the changes to Germany’s asylum law. The Greens shot down similar legislation in Germany’s upper house of parliament in 2017. The new draft law was expected to come up before the Bundesrat as early as February 15, 2019, but it was not approved there and never became law.
Asylum-seekers who sought to hide their identity or refused to cooperate in obtaining new documents from their home country risked losing their right to remain in Germany under leaked details of a draft law. That draft became the Geordnete-Rückkehr-Gesetz (Second Act to Improve Enforcement of the Obligation to Leave the Country), passed by the Bundestag on 7 June 2019.
The proposals also include changes to the law to allow migrants awaiting deportation to be held in regular prisons, according to details leaked to Bild newspaper.
There are concerns the proposed changes could affect Syrian migrants who fled the Assad regime. Human rights activists have warned their families could be in danger if they request new identity documents from embassies controlled by the regime.
The leaked details emerged in January 2019, when the German parliament voted to designate Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Georgia as “safe countries” — a designation that never took effect for these states under that bill.
The proposed new law is the brainchild of Horst Seehofer, the interior minister who has repeatedly clashed with Angela Merkel over refugee policy.
The proposed law is not aimed at those granted full asylum as refugees, but at those who are given temporary leave to remain.
Public anger has been growing over repeated government failures to deport migrants who have been refused asylum.
Hundreds of thousands of migrants are allowed to stay in Germany on a temporary basis. Often it is because it is not safe for them to return to their home countries, but in some cases they cannot be deported because they do not have the necessary paperwork.
The most notorious case is Anis Amri, who drove a lorry into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin in 2016, killing 12 people. Amri had been ordered to be deported, but his native Tunisia would not accept him because he had no valid identity papers.
Under the proposed new law, those who do not help authorities find new their ID papers would lose the temporary right to remain and face detention until they could be deported.
German authorities already require Syrians to obtain new passports from embassies controlled by the Assad regime, despite warnings from human rights groups that this could place their relatives in Syria at risk of reprisals.
The proposed law extends the maximum period migrants could be held before deportation to six months.
It also makes it possible for them to be held in special sections of regular prisons because of a shortage of deportation centers, though it is not clear if this would be possible as the European court has previously held the practice to be against European Union regulations.
Seehofer did secure backing: the Bundestag passed the Geordnete-Rückkehr-Gesetz on 7 June 2019. Mrs Merkel’s main coalition partners, the centre-Left Social Democrats (SPD), have opposed previous attempts by the interior minister to toughen the law.
“It would be better to analyze the current problems with implementing the law and fix them, rather than create yet more new regulations,” Burkhard Lischka, a senior SPD MP told Bild.
Source: dw.com