PRESS STATEMENT: JRS GERMANY (08/06/09)
"BERLIN URGENTLY NEEDS TO MONITOR DEPORTATIONS"

“Berlin urgently needs to monitor deportations”. Following the deportation of 100 people to Vietnam, Director JRS Germany, Martin Stark SJ, has called on the federal government to introduce an independent body to oversee removals from the German capital.

JRS Germany wants to see the monitoring of such crisis situations, with the enforcement of minimum humanitarian standards during the process of deportation. In Frankfurt and Dusseldorf, monitoring bodies already exist, in cooperation with the local church, and only recently such a body was introduced in Hamburg.

The German-Vietnamese withdrawal agreement of 1995 lays down procedures for identification of persons in these cases – with so-called 'embassy hearings', For these hearings, it has been known that the delegations from Vietnam identify their supposed/actual countrymen according to very arbitrary criteria.

Collective expulsion inevitably leads to excessively long periods of detention. It is worrying that of all the detainees in police custody in Berlin for more than two months, that three-quarters are Vietnamese – the majority of which will be deported. Despite these statistics, authorities should be deporting as soon as possible to ease pressure on the authorities concerned.

Statement available in German here