German state of Bavaria prepares to sue federal government over alleged mishandling of the refugee crisis

The German daily Tagesspiegel reports that the German state of Bavaria is preparing a Constitutional complaint against the German Government over the current influx of refugees into the country. The country’s largest state is of the opinion that the federal government is not meeting its obligations during the refugee crisis by not attempting to restrict the arrival of immigrants to the country.

Most refugees are now arriving in Germany across the Austrian-Bavaian border. The Bavarian State Government, according to Tagesspiegl, has entrusted former Constitutional Court Justice Uda Di Fabia with drafting a report that should become the basis for a lawsuit at the Constitutional Court.

Politicians in Munich are convinced that the current refugee crisis is threatening the stability of Bavaria and limiting its options for functioning as a state. The federal government, in their view, is not doing enough to improve the situation in Bavaria.

Protecting the external border of Germany falls within the purview of the federal government under the German Constitution. According to Bavarian state officials, the cabinet in Berlin should have put forth more of an effort to control the arrival of refugees into the country.

The politicians in Munich also see it as problematic that the German authorities have withdrawn from a practice that is assumed to conform to European standards, namely, they are not returning the refugees to the countries where they first found entered European Union territory. Last month Bavaria threatened to sue the federal government if it did not halt the current wave of immigration into the country.

The disputes have been dampened this week by an agreement between the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) and German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) on the creation of so-called transit zones at the border that would make it possible to prevent asylum-seekers who have no chance of receiving asylum in Germany from ever entering German territory. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) is against that proposal, however, and is in the Government with the conservative CDU/CSU bloc.

The biggest burden of the refugee crisis in Germany is being felt by Bavaria in particular, as the vast majority of asylum-seekers are arriving there. The Bavarian authorities are overwhelmed and are not managing to register the refugees arriving from Austria quickly enough.

This morning, according to German television station N24, there were 3 000 asylum-seekers waiting at the border to enter Germany. Yesterday there were 2 500.