- As court jails two aged climate activists for sabotaging oil pipeline
The number of refugees in Germany reached a new high in mid-2024, the federal government stated in response to a parliamentary question from the far-left Die Linke (The Left) party.
About 3.48 million refugees with varying residency permits were living in the country at the end of June, or over 60,000 higher at the end of 2023, the figure released on Friday showed. The information was first reported by the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung newspaper.
A report by the German News Service (delivered by dpa) affirmed that the number of refugees was particularly high in 2022, when hundreds of thousands of war refugees from Ukraine sought shelter in Germany after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February of that year.
Unlike the statistics on asylum applications, the Central Register of Foreigners, which the federal government referred to in its response, also takes departures into account.
According to the federal government, the number of those legally required to leave the country fell slightly in the first half of this year.
As of June 30, there were 226,882 foreigners who were required to leave Germany but who were still in the country. People from Iraq made up the largest group among them. Almost 20 percent of them were legally required to leave Germany, but four out of five of those were allowed to stay under a tolerance policy.
Tolerated individuals are people who are obliged to leave, but are not deported for certain reasons, which can include a lack of identification documents, an illness or because they have a child who has a residence permit.
By way of comparison, at the end of 2023, around 243,000 people required to leave the country were staying in Germany, of whom around 194,000 were tolerated.
A legal policy expert for Die Linke, Clara Bünger, canvassed an end to “all measures aimed at expelling people without the right to remain from the country,” saying the law introduced by the current federal government sets the bar too high, but that it nevertheless opened the way for many people to a secure right of residence.
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This aspect of immigration law came into force on December 31, 2022. It applies to people who have been in Germany with a tolerated stay, a residence permit or a permit for at least five years as of the cut-off date of October 31, 2022. They and their relatives can receive a kind of probationary residence permit for 18 months.
Meanwhile, two aged German climate activists have been sentenced to several months in prison for sabotage or attempted sabotage of an oil pipeline in eastern Germany, a court said at the weekend.
As the two activists, aged 69 and 74, told the Neubrandenburg District Court that they would carry out more crimes “to save the world’s climate,” their prison sentences were not suspended, a court spokeswoman said.
The 69-year-old was sentenced to seven months, including another conviction from Bavaria, while the older activist got three months.
The duo, who were convicted of property damage, trespassing and disruption of a public utility facility, due to two incidents at pumping stations in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in April 2022, did not deny the acts, according to the court spokeswoman, adding: “They saw themselves as justified in committing these crimes to save the world’s climate.”
In one instance on April 27, 2022, the pair intruded into a pumping station near Demmin, which belongs to the Brandenburg refinery PCK Schwedt.
The court said they damaged a chain-link fence and the security chain of a rotary valve at a time no oil was being pumped there.
Two days later, they entered a pumping station near the Brandenburg border, again damaging the fence and a security chain and actually stopping the oil flow, causing a temporary switch to emergency operations. The pipeline supplies the refinery with oil from the port of Rostock.
