German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday said she backed legal changes to make it easier to deport migrants who commit crimes, after authorities said many accused of shocking mob violence on Thursday last week were asylum seekers.
Under current laws, asylum seekers are only forcibly sent back if they have been sentenced to jail terms of at least three years and if their lives are not at risk in their countries of origin.
After dozens of women in Cologne were sexually assaulted on New Year’s Eve by a crowd of men — described by witnesses as mostly of Arab and North African appearance — Merkel said it was time to ask: “When do you lose your right to stay with us?”
“We should ask ourselves whether it might be necessary to take this away earlier [than is currently the case] and I have to say that for me, we must take it away sooner,” she said.
“We must do this for us, and for the many refugees who were not present during the events in Cologne,” she told a meeting of party officials in the southwestern city of Mainz.
Merkel had already called for a discussion on whether to toughen the deportation policy, but this is the first time she has explicitly backed a change in the law.
In revelations that have shocked Germans and claimed the scalp of Cologne’s police chief, women seeing in the New Year had to run a gauntlet of groping, lewd insults and thefts in an aggressive and drunken crush of about 1,000 men.
By Friday, Cologne police had received more than 200 criminal complaints, mostly over sexual offenses from groping to two alleged rapes, Spiegel Online reported.
Officials from Merkel’s Christian Democrats party were to propose that migrants jailed for any length of time in Germany should face deportation.
“Why should German taxpayers pay to imprison foreign criminals?” said German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, leader of the Social Democrats, coalition partners to the Christian Democrats. “The threat of having to spend time behind bars in their home country is far more of a deterrent than a prison sentence in Germany.”
A draft paper for the meeting called for lower barriers to deport criminal asylum seekers, increased video surveillance and the creation of a new criminal offense of physical assault.
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