Interior minister sets out raft of measures including deportation centres to make it easier to remove rejected asylum seekers

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Germany’s interior ministry is seeking to overhaul the country’s security apparatus and make it easier to deport rejected asylum seekers in the wake of last month’s terrorist attack on a Berlin Christmas market.

Outlining a raft of measures in an article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , the interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, said recent terror attacks, as well as reports of cyber attacks on the Bundestag, meant “we have to face the fact that our state has to be better prepared for difficult times than it is now”.

One step towards such an overhaul would be to centralise the country’s counter-terrorism apparatus, said De Maizière, who is a member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party. “We don’t have federal jurisdiction to deal with national catastrophes. The jurisdiction for the fight against international terrorism is fragmented,” he said.

“The federal police’s scope of action is restricted to railway stations, airports and border controls,” he wrote, stressing that “it is time” to re-examine Germany’s security setup.

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Anis Amri, the Tunisian man believed to have been behind the attack at Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz on 19 December, when an articulated lorry was used to plough into a busy Christmas market, had dropped off German security agencies’ radar even though he had been identified as a potential terrorist threat. In the aftermath of the attack some officials pointed to a mix-up of regional competences.

“The current remit of the federal police is too limited,” De Maizière wrote. “We need a set of common rules and better coordination, for instance in checking dangerous individuals.” The federal government should be given greater powers to steer domestic intelligence services, said the minister.

German authorities have also been criticised for failing to deport Amri, 24, despite his asylum appliction being rejected. Officials in North Rhine-Westphalia said paperwork required to extradite him had only arrived from Tunisia in the days after the attack.

In his article published on Tuesday, De Maizière called for a nationwide effort on the issue of deportation, suggesting that centralised departure centres should be set up to hold asylum seekers in the weeks or days leading up to their expulsion.

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In Italy, where Amri was shot dead during a confrontation with police on 23 December, the new prime minister, Paolo Gentiloni, has signalled a similarly hardened stance on the issue of migrant expulsions.

Italy’s police chief, Franco Gabrielli, last Friday sent a two-page directive to police stations across the country ordering them to increase efforts to identify and deport migrants, telling officers to take “extraordinary action” before the “growing migratory pressure in an international context marked by instability and threats” to “control and remove irregular foreigners”.

The interior minister, Marco Minniti, plans to open several new detention centres that hold migrants ahead of their expulsion, a ministry source told Reuters.