A ruling of the Federal Constitutional Court’s may seriously hamper the efforts of the government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz to bring down the number of illegal immigrants in Germany, says those in law-enforcement.
Germany’s highest court has ruled that police need to obtain a search warrant before they can enter the residence of an asylum seeker slated for deportation.
The ruling came on September 30 but has only just been made public.
Lawyer Ulrich Vosgerau called the decision “a disaster for immigration authorities” in an op-ed for news site Nius on November 23, saying deportations were already difficult enough and too often ended in failure.
Jochen Kopelke, chairman of police officers’ union GdP, said the court was “making the police’s work more difficult” as the mandatory warrants constituted an added difficulty when the police had to act fast.
The court case involved the complaint of an asylum seeker from Guinea who had protested against his own deportation in Berlin in 2019. After the man locked himself in his bedroom, the police officers broke the door down with a battering ram.
The judges ruled that because police entered the plaintiff’s room in a communal accommodation for asylum seekers by force, their actions qualified as a “house search”.
Therefore, officers should have obtained a search warrant from a judge first as, otherwise, the act constituted a violation of the plaintiff’s fundamental right to inviolability of the home.
The ruling voids a stipulation in German Residence Law that allowed police to enter a residence to carry out a deportation if there were indications that the deportee was currently inside the premises.
In future, police will have to obtain a search warrant at the local court – making deportations potentially more cumbersome.
According to government information from 2024, more than 60 per cent of deportations planned between January and September that year could not be carried out for numerous reasons. Altogether, 20,084 individuals were deported from Germany in 2024.
The asylum seeker in the court case had been supported by German NGOs, Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte (Society for Civil Rights) and Pro Asyl.
In a press release, Pro Asyl welcomed at the court’s decision.
Wiebke Judith, a spokeswoman for the NGO, said: “Refugees have fundamental rights that cannot simply be ignored just because deportation is involved.
“Today’s ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court is an important reminder to the government to respect fundamental and human rights in its migration policy at a time when the rights of refugees are increasingly being called into question.”
The Guinean asylum seeker is reportedly still residing in Germany.
The number of illegal immigrants in the country today is estimated at more than 1 million.
