Asylum in Germany

The right of asylum for victims of political persecution is a basic right stipulated in the Constitution of Germany.

In a wider sense, the right of asylum recognises the definition of 'refugee' as established in the 1951 Refugee Convention and is understood to protect asylum seekers from deportation and grant them certain protections under the law. Generally, these protections are a part of the asylum procedure itself and are verified by the Federal Office For Migration and Refugees (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge, 'BAMF') without any further application.

In 1993 and 2015, the initially unlimited right of asylum was revised in essential points and also limited.

In light of the refugee crisis in the second half of 2015, a transformation of the fundamental right of asylum (section 16a GG) into an objective guarantee was demanded in order to give the state the legal opportunity to impose an upper limit or quota.

The German residence act (Aufenthaltsgesetz) only regulates refugee status. Neither the residence act nor the asylum law (Asylgesetz) defines the concept of asylum. Its content and limitations are primarily a result of the court ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court concerning Section 16a GG in the German Basic Law. In accordance with Section 16a (1) GG, a person is considered to be experiencing political persecution if he or she is suffering from infringements of his or her rights by the state or third person measures that can be attributed to the state, because of religious or political convictions or other inaccessible features that mark the individual's otherness. These infringements of the personal rights violate human dignity and, depending on their intensity and severity, exclude the individual person from the state's general keeping of the peace and put him or her in a desperate situation.

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Wikipedia