Katharina Schoenes
Clara Bünger’s office in the Bundestag, The Party «Die Linke»
At the beginning of the war in Ukraine, several representatives of the then federal government declared that people from Russia who did not want to participate in the war in Ukraine, which violated international law, should be granted protection in Germany. Scholz also made a similar statement in the fall of 2022, when Putin ordered a partial mobilization. We have now requested the latest figures on asylum procedures for Russian citizens of conscription age in order to assess the extent to which the traffic light coalition has fulfilled its promise.
The results are sobering: since the beginning of 2022, 6,374 male Russian citizens between the ages of 18 and 45 have applied for asylum in Germany. In 6,651 cases, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (German: Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge, BAMF) has made a decision (the fact that the number of decisions is slightly higher than the number of applications indicates that some of the procedures date back to before the beginning of 2022). Only 349 people have been granted protection status. BAMF rejected 2,689 asylum applications after reviewing their content, and even more cases (3,613) were closed in other ways (presumably, a large proportion of these were inadmissibility decisions in the Dublin procedure).
In addition, since February 24, 2024, around 2,150 individually persecuted Russian citizens and their relatives have been granted humanitarian visas under §22.2 AufenthG (Trans. note — Residence Act).
By way of comparison, #ObjectWarCampaign estimates that by July 2023, at least 250,000 people will have left Russia to avoid military service.
REVIEW BY CLARA BÜNGER
«Just 349 Russian citizens of military age have been granted protection status in Germany since the start of the war in Ukraine. Given that an estimated hundreds of thousands have left Russia since then to avoid military service, this is a shamefully low number. Olaf Scholz’s promise to grant protection to those who do not want to participate in the war against Ukraine, which violates international law, has not even begun to be fulfilled.»
«The right to conscientious objection is under enormous pressure in times of rearmament and militarization, as debates about the reintroduction of compulsory military service in this country also show. As leftists, we firmly reject such compulsory service. We defend the right to conscientious objection, which must include asylum protection for conscientious objectors.»
Katharina Schoenes — social scientist and PhD expert in migration policy, racism research, and feminist theory; received her PhD in 2022 from the University of Osnabrück on asylum practices of German courts in cases of persecution based on homosexuality and works in the Bundestag office of Clara Bünger («Die Linke»)
Clara Bünger — Lawyer and human rights activist, member of the Bundestag for the party «Die Linke» since 2022; specializes in migration law, supports refugees, and criticizes the restrictive policies of the EU