German Federal Police intercept asylum seekers in Basel
This year alone, more than 7,000 migrants were returned to Switzerland. An agreement from 1961 makes this possible.
German Federal Police checking ID cards on a train (glyph).
Photography: Keystone/Daniel Carman
German Federal Police are intercepting migrants at Badischer Bahnhof in Basel – on a massive scale. According to the German newspaper “Welt am Sonntag”, the border with Switzerland is a “new immigration hotspot” for Germans.
On trains running from Basel SBB station to Badischer Bahnhof, you look for people who look like they are on a long journey. People who wear clothes that are very light and look worn.
20 rejections a day
This year alone, according to the Federal Police, people who entered Switzerland without permission were turned back more than 7,000 times – and this also includes people who tried several times, writes the newspaper Welt am Sonntag. On average, that’s more than 20 cases per day.
The reason why German authorities monitor migrants on Swiss soil is simple: if asylum seekers succeed in crossing the border, Germany is responsible for asylum and residence procedures. But if they do do so in Basel, “Switzerland is responsible for continuing the processing of the asylum application and, if necessary, implementing the Dublin procedures,” the German federal government wrote in September in response to a short question from the Bundestag. .
The fact that the German Federal Police can conduct inspections on Swiss territory at all goes back to an agreement reached in 1961. The aim of the “agreement on the establishment of adjacent border clearance points and the border clearance of transport during the journey” was to facilitate the crossing of the common border. In the so-called zones, the Federal Police are allowed to carry out border police actions on Swiss territory.
Cat and mouse game
According to the Swiss Federal Office for Customs and Border Security (BAZG), the SBB Basel – Basel Badischer Bahnhof route is such an area: “Persons detained by the German border control authorities on this section of the route will be returned.” “By Switzerland using a simplified procedure,” confirms BAZG spokeswoman Tapia Rudin.
This has tangible consequences: according to German Federal Police statistics, Germany returned 4,787 people to Switzerland in the first six months of this year. In the Czech Republic and Poland, which do not have such an agreement, there were 26 and 16 respectively in the same period.
However, this does not mean that rejected immigrants will not end up in Germany. Your data is recorded by German officials, but after you are returned to Switzerland, the monitoring more or less stops. In most cases, migrants can no longer be detained, a spokesman for the State Secretariat for Migration confirmed to this newspaper at the beginning of the year.
Nothing prevents immigrants from trying their luck again immediately afterwards.
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