THE AFRICAN COURIER. Reporting Africa and its Diaspora! The African Courier is an international magazine published in Germany to report on Africa and the Diaspora African experience. The first issue of the bimonthly magazine appeared on the newsstands on 15 February 1998. The African Courier is a communication forum for European-African political, economic and cultural exchanges, and a voice for Africa in Europe.
In 2024, German administrative courts granted fewer asylum-seekers’ appeals against decisions by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF).
According to government data cited by the German news agency dpa, only 18% of appeals succeeded, down from 24.4% in 2023 and 36.5% in 2022. This decline in the success rate of appeals suggests an improvement in BAMF’s decision-making, potentially influenced by fewer new asylum applications, according to the dpa report.
Germany received 229,751 initial asylum applications in 2024, a 30.2% decrease from the previous year. The federal government, in response to a parliamentary inquiry from the Left Party, indicated that the reduced caseload may have allowed BAMF to allocate more resources per case, improving the quality of initial assessments.
However, disparities in BAMF’s decisions across regional offices have drawn criticism. The Left Party highlighted inconsistencies, noting that while most BAMF offices granted protection to over 90% of Afghan applicants, the Eisenhüttenstadt branch approved only 60.8%. Similarly, Somali applicants had a 98.6% protection rate in Munich but just 50% in Eisenhüttenstadt, located in the eastern state of Brandenburg. “I would like to know what is going on in Eisenhüttenstadt,” said Left Party MP Clara Bünger, emphasizing that “equal chances must apply to all in the asylum process.”
As of November 2024, BAMF employed 2,747 staff members for asylum processing, according to the federal government. Among them, 396 handled Dublin procedures — cases where another European country is responsible for the application — and 117 managed revocation and withdrawal cases, which occur when protection status is reconsidered due to changes in an applicant’s home country or false information.
Germany’s decline in asylum applications aligns with broader migration trends. In 2024, asylum requests fell 34%, from 322,636 to 213,499. Authorities attribute this to stricter border controls. Since October 2023, roughly 50,000 people were denied entry at German borders, over 2,000 human traffickers were arrested and illegal arrivals detected by federal police dropped by nearly a third, according to the federal ministry of the interior.
Despite new legislation to expedite deportations, over 60% of planned deportations in 2024 failed. Between January and September, 23,610 of 38,328 deportation attempts were unsuccessful, reflecting ongoing enforcement challenges, according to government data.
Felix Dappah
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