The German border police can no longer reject asylum seekers who arrive from neighboring European Union countries without investigating their claims, a Berlin court ruled on Monday, dealing a blow to Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s attempts to control such migration.
The ruling came in response to a legal complaint filed by three Somali refugees who were sent back to Poland shortly after the German police barred them from entering at the eastern border last month, following new directives from the government.
Days after Mr. Merz was sworn in as chancellor, Alexander Dobrindt, his interior minister, ordered the border police to send back some asylum seekers who arrive at the border from other European Union countries. The new rule was an attempt to deliver on Mr. Merz’s campaign promise to reduce the number of asylum seekers entering Germany.
It remained unclear to what degree the ruling on Monday would stymie plans to limit the number of arrivals; the government is also suspending a program that lets asylum seekers sponsor their families.
On Monday night, Mr. Dobrindt said that he did not believe that the court’s ruling covered the practice in general and applied only to the one case. And he promised to continue his policies at the border.
“We stand by our legal opinion and do not consider it to have been undermined in this instance,” he told reporters.
At issue in this case is the Dublin Regulation, an agreement among European Union countries stipulating that each person has to claim asylum in the E.U. country in which he or she first sets foot.
In the quest to get to Germany, many asylum seekers do not make their claim until reaching the German border, often with the tacit encouragement of officials in other countries in the bloc’s east and south, where most asylum seekers first arrive in Europe. The court found that Germany was not facing a national emergency that would allow it to ignore the regulation.
After letting in refugees who should have requested or have claimed refugee status elsewhere, backlogged German officials can spend months trying to determine which neighboring country has responsibility for the refugees. Deporting them can take more months.
Many officials predicted that the decision to simply reject some asylum seekers without properly investigating whether their claims were legitimate would be challenged in courts.
“We have said from the outset that the procedure recently introduced for rejecting asylum seekers and those seeking protection is highly controversial from a legal perspective,” Andreas Rosskopf, the leader of one of Germany’s police unions, told reporters after the ruling.
In its decision, the court noted that while the authorities were not obligated to allow asylum seekers free entry into Germany under the Dublin accord, they cannot send them back without looking into their claims, either.
One of the government’s options would be to hold applicants in processing centers until the authorities can determine which of the bloc’s countries was responsible for their various asylum claims.
The Berlin court was responding to a legal claim brought by two men and a woman from Somalia who had tried to enter Germany close to Frankfurt an der Oder, a city about an hour’s drive east of Berlin. Despite telling the border police they were claiming asylum, they were sent back to Poland, where they filed their legal petition.
Last summer, a Syrian asylum seeker with reported links to the Islamic State attacked revelers at a summer city music festival celebrating diversity in the city of Solingen, killing three people and injuring eight others.
It later emerged that he should have made his asylum claim in Bulgaria and that the German authorities who had tried to send him back could not so do because he was not in his room at the asylum residence when they arrived.
Christopher F. Schuetze is a reporter for The Times based in Berlin, covering politics, society and culture in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
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