A member of the ruling Christian Democrats (CDU) is now criticizing the practice of “church asylum,” which he says is a violation of European law.
Alexander Throm, the domestic policy spokesperson for the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, said that in these cases, the migrants in question are not even being deported back to their home countries, but are instead headed to the EU countries where these migrants were first registered.
“What’s remarkable is that almost all of these church asylum cases—there were around 2,300 or 2,400 such cases across Germany last year—are so-called Dublin cases,” Throm told RTL/ntv’s Frühstart program on Wednesday. He said they are not being sent home, but “returned to the EU country actually responsible for their asylum procedure, i.e., a safe country where a proper asylum procedure is guaranteed.”
Church asylum is the controversial practice where churches shelter migrants from deportation on church grounds; however, nearly all of the migrants who arrived in Germany passed through many safe countries on their way. As a result, Germany has the right to deport many of them back, including to countries like Poland, Italy, and Greece, under the Dublin rules.
“I believe the churches are taking the wrong side here,” Throm said. He said they were undermining EU law “by keeping people in church asylum so long that the time limits have expired, then they are also undermining European law.”
Now, he is calling for the state’s handling of church asylum cases to be rethought, “especially in Dublin cases.”
There is no actual law preventing the state from removing the migrants who are under deportation violations, but there is a “tacit agreement,” according to Welt, that protects these migrants.
The Church has increasingly resorted to using church asylum to shield migrants. The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bamf) reported that in 2024, there were 2,386 cases, a jump of 300 compared to 2023.
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