Friday 19 / April / 2024
Berlin/Istanbul: A prominent ally of Germany's Angela Merkel threatened on Saturday to take her government to court over its "open doors" refugee policy as political pressure grows for the chancellor to reduce the number of new arrivals.
Bavarian state premier Horst Seehofer said he would send the federal government a written request within the next two weeks to restore "orderly conditions" at the nation's borders, through which one million migrants and refugees passed last year alone.
"If it doesn't follow, the state government will have no other choice but to file a suit at the federal constitutional court," Seehofer told Der Spiegel magazine.
Seehofer has issued a series of ultimatums to Merkel in recent months to press her into taking immediate action to limit the influx of migrants, only to back down at the last minute.
His comments reflect increasing doubt among Germans about Merkel's "we can do this" mantra in the face of Europe's biggest migrant crisis since World War II, especially since assaults in Cologne on New Year's Eve were blamed on migrants.
Merkel's popularity has dropped following the assaults, a poll showed on Friday.
Bavaria, a conservative state that borders Austria to the south, is the home of Seehofer's Christian Social Union (CSU) -- sister party to Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) -- and is the main entry point for migrants and refugees.
The state's finance minister, Markus Soeder, told Der Spiegel Merkel's refugee policy was not democratically legitimised and said parliament should vote on the matter.
Senior figures from the Social Democrats (SPD), Merkel's second coalition partner, have also broken ranks in recent days by challenging her welcoming approach to asylum seekers.
SPD leader Sigmar Gabriel joined the critical voices on Saturday. "We have to get from a chaotic to an orderly immigration," he told several regional newspapers.
He said border checks needed to be improved and refugee quotas should be introduced to maintain control over how many people come to Germany and when they arrive.
Germany could take in more than the 200,000 refugees proposed by Seehofer as an official cap for this year, Gabriel said. "But the quota also has to be significantly below the immigration numbers of the previous year," he added, without giving a concrete figure.
Merkel has vowed to "measurably reduce" arrivals this year, but has refused to introduce a cap, saying it would be impossible to enforce without closing German borders.
Instead, she has tried to convince European partners to take on quotas of refugees, pushed for building "hotspot" reception centres on Europe's external borders and led an EU campaign to convince Turkey to keep refugees from entering the bloc. Progress has been slow so far, however. Meanwhile, the United Nations' refugee agency will seek additional resources for Turkey, the world's largest host of refugees, and push for more resettlement, its head said on Saturday, as the civil war in Syria is set to enter its sixth year.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has called for a "massive resettlement" of Syrian and other refugees within Europe to distribute hundreds of thousands of people.
"We will do whatever we can to help the Turkish government find additional resources for people who are living here under temporary protection to make their lives as good as we can," Filippo Grandi, who took the helm at the UNHCR this month, told reporters in Istanbul.
"We will work on other aspects as well... We will work on more resettlement opportunities," he said after meeting refugees at camps near the Syrian border in his first visit as commissioner at the agency.
The UNHCR currently supports Turkey with relief items, field monitoring and technical advice.
About 10 per cent of the 2.2 million Syrians sheltering in Turkey stay in camps. The rest struggle to make ends meet in cities around the country, often working illegally for a fraction of the minimum wage.
Grandi praised Turkish plans to award more work permits to some refugees, calling it a "very courageous and important gesture... Work permits will help people live a better life, whether they'll stay here long or short," he said.
Otherwise, refugees depend on aid organisations' handouts or must beg for money, he added.
Only 7,300 work permits have been issued to date, officials said, but the government plans to offer more permits to discourage refugees from crossing illegally into Europe, a minister said this week, amid European Union pressure to reduce the flow of migrants.
