German Court Upholds Tough Asylum Law

BERLIN — Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court on Tuesday upheld a controversial 1993 law that transformed this country from one of the world’s easiest for asylum-seekers to enter into one of the most difficult.

Groups that work with foreigners here deplored the decision, made by the country’s highest court for constitutional questions. They said that while their appeals to the judiciary are now exhausted, they will continue to press the government in other areas for more liberal treatment of refugees seeking haven in Germany.

Tuesday’s ruling means that, in general, only those foreigners who arrive by air from dangerous homelands--and who hold proper travel documents--will be able to stay in Germany long enough to file applications for refugee status.

Those who come overland, passing through Germany’s neighboring countries on their way, will be immediately sent back to those “safe” third nations.

Until 1993, the German Constitution had made such instant deportations impossible. All asylum claimants--no matter where they came from--were allowed exhaustive legal appeals as authorities decided whether they qualified as refugees under international convention.

Today’s speedy deportations have prompted human rights groups to protest that desperate foreigners are being made into human Ping-Pong balls: After they are bounced out of Germany, they are apt to land in some other country that bounces them out again, and so on.

The farther from industrialized Western Europe they get, critics say, the likelier it is that they will end up in a country with poor human rights guarantees.

Jutta Limbach, the chief justice, on Tuesday offered asylum-seekers a small amount of relief in another area of controversy: Germany’s 1993 “airport rule,” which allows authorities to hold asylum-seekers in airports and decide within three days whether their petitions for haven are worth considering.

The British-based human rights group Amnesty International had argued that refugees usually arrive so exhausted, fearful and disoriented that they can’t argue their cases effectively in just three days in an airport.

Limbach wrote in her 300-page ruling that the airport rule could stay on the books but that the government would have to extend the review period to seven days and provide the new arrivals with competent legal advice.

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After World War II, Germany wrote into its constitution a guarantee to shelter all persecuted people, as a way of atoning for the ethnically based mass murder of the Nazi years. By 1993, many foreigners were taking advantage of this provision, traveling to Germany and announcing that they were refugees, whether they qualified or not. More than 438,000 people tried this in 1993 alone.

With the economic turbulence of the early 1990s, some Germans began to take out their frustration on foreigners, even to the point of staging vicious attacks on immigrants.