Germany to cut benefits for refugees facing deportation

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Germany says it will cut benefits to refugees facing deportation, part of a package of tough new measures drafted in response to last week’s terror attack in the western city of Solingen.

Ministers also said they would introduce a ban on knives at big public events and allow police investigators to use facial recognition software to identify crime suspects.

“The Solingen attack has shocked us to the core,” said Nancy Faeser, interior minister. “We always said the government would respond to it with tough measures.”

Chancellor Olaf Scholz had come under intense pressure to overhaul immigration policy and tighten weapons laws as a result of the Solingen incident, where three people were stabbed to death and eight injured. Terror group Isis has claimed responsibility for the knife attack.

A 26-year-old Syrian refugee was arrested last Saturday over the incident after handing himself into police and has been remanded in custody on suspicion of murder and membership of a terror organisation.

Friedrich Merz, leader of the German opposition, called on the government to immediately stop accepting refugees from Syria and Afghanistan and start deporting criminals from both countries back to their homelands — a practice which current German law does not allow.

Public anger has focused on the fact that the suspected perpetrator was supposed to have been deported last year to Bulgaria, the country through which he had first entered the EU and where he first applied for asylum.

The deportation would have been conducted under the EU’s Dublin rules, which stipulate that refugees’ asylum claims must be assessed in the country in which they first arrive, not where they end up.

But authorities did not find the Syrian at his normal abode when they came to detain him, and never returned. After six months elapsed, the deadline for his transfer to Bulgaria expired and he became Germany’s responsibility.

Faeser said a refugee would no longer be entitled to welfare benefits if a country has agreed to take them back under the Dublin rules.

Marco Buschmann, justice minister, said this would help ensure that the person earmarked for deportation “would then get in touch with the authorities or might voluntarily move to the country responsible for him, for economic reasons”.

He said “tens of thousands of deportations” that were legally possible under the Dublin rules and practicable because other countries had agreed to their return “still don’t happen because it’s announced that the people cannot be found . . . That has to stop”.

Buschmann and Faeser presented a long catalogue of measures designed to prevent a repeat of last Friday’s attack.

People would not be allowed to carry flick-knives, and knives of all types would be banned on long-distance trains and buses, as well as at festivals and sporting and other public events, the ministers said, without detailing how the measure would be policed.

Germany’s 16 federal states will be given the power to ban all knives at train stations and also on local transport. Police will be allowed to use tasers against violent offenders, and authorities will be empowered to carry out more rigorous background checks on applicants for weapons licences.

Authorities will also acquire more powers to crack down on Islamist terror. Investigators will be allowed to use facial recognition software to identify suspects and to employ artificial intelligence to analyse police data.

Buschmann said any immigrant who attacks or threatens people with a knife “must be quickly deported”.

“Whoever attacks anyone on the basis of their gender, sexual orientation or their Jewish faith . . . whoever is motivated by Islamism, jihadism or other extremist ideas cannot receive asylum and be recognised as a refugee in Germany,” said Buschmann. Germany has seen an increase in antisemitic incidents since Hamas’s terror attack on October 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza.

The government also plans to set up a special task force to increase the number of deportations carried out under the Dublin procedure.

It will also ensure refugees who travel back to their home countries for holidays lose their right to asylum in Germany. Ukrainians, as well as people going home to attend the funerals of close relatives, will be exempted from the new rule.

The ministers also said they were working hard to allow for the repatriation of Afghans and Syrians who had committed serious crimes — one of opposition leader Merz’s main demands.