According to media reports, the German government will abandon its abstention on the so-called crisis regulation at the EU level. Chancellor Scholz reportedly intervened decisively at today's cabinet meeting, deciding that the government would "not stand in the way" of the crisis regulation in Brussels. This means the Chancellor is responsible for another massive breach of universally applicable children's and human rights within the EU.
The crisis regulation is intended to allow for delays in registrations, extensions of border procedures, and massive reductions in accommodation and reception standards in cases of "crisis," "instrumentalization," and "force majeure." In doing so, the German government is crossing another red line, particularly with regard to children and young people – the crisis regulation provides for no exceptions whatsoever for them. This means that even unaccompanied children and young people from countries with high recognition rates, such as Syria and Afghanistan, could in the future spend up to 20 weeks at the external borders in camps under detention or detention-like conditions to pursue their asylum applications. This is untenable, especially given that, following the agreement in June, the German government included a supplementary declaration stating that exceptions to border procedures for minors and their family members remained very important to them.
“It is incomprehensible that Chancellor Scholz, especially after the massive human rights and children’s rights criticism of the reform plans for the common European asylum system in June, is forcing the German government to approve the crisis regulation. The crisis regulation gives individual member states the power to declare a state of emergency and thus, with legal legitimacy under European law, continue the massive human rights violations that we are already witnessing in the external border countries. Human rights violations are not combated by giving them a legal framework. The individual right to asylum, the Geneva Refugee Convention, and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child continue to apply at the European external borders. An agreement on a crisis regulation in Brussels openly calls this into question once again,” says Sophia Eckert, asylum and migration expert at terre des hommes .
In June, terre des hommes together with 54 other German organizations, issued a joint appeal to vote against the crisis regulation. A similar appeal at the European level was supported by more than 100 organizations across the EU.