Interior Minister Horst Seehofer says the Bremen branch of the Migration Office won’t decide any more asylum cases. The move is an attempt to counter accusations that the office wrongly approved hundreds of applications.
The German Interior Ministry has prohibited the Bremen center of the Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) from deciding whether individual refugees will be admitted to the country.
“Confidence in the quality of the asylum procedures and the integrity of the Bremen arrival center has been massively damaged,” Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said in his statement announcing the move.
An internal BAMF report, Seehofer added, had shown that “legal regulations and internal policies” had been “disregarded” at the center.
The center has been accused of improperly approving some 1200 applications for political asylum between 2013 and 2016. Critics allege that center employees essentially waved people through without carrying out background checks.
Seehofer said that all decisions by the employees in question would be reviewed. He also said that a random sample of every tenth BAMF asylum decision would be subject to special monitoring. Other regional BAMF offices have been implicated in the scandal.
The refugee agency, and in particular the office’s president, Jutta Cordt, has come under intense criticism for alleged irregularities in asylum procedure. Bremen prosecutors are currently investigating the possibility of bribery in the Bremen office.
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