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Germany: Socialists' shame

01 January 1993

Gunter Grass has resigned from the SPD in protest at its agreement to abolish the constitutional right to asylum in Germany. Clause 16 of the constitution gives anyone reaching Germany the right to seek political asylum. Its abolition, which Germany's Right and centre parties have been calling for years, will leave the country subject to the Geneva Convention, which many argue is in fact wider in its terms, encompassing as it does asylum on religious, racial and social grounds as well as political ones. But the Constitutional right to asylum has been of vital symbolic importance. It has also inhibited the German authorities from indulging in the "pass-the-refugee" exercise of shuttling refugees back to other "safe" countries passed through en route. With the change in the law refugees arriving from other EC countries and other countries considered to be "safe" (like Poland and Hungary) will be returned. It also underpinned the decision of the administrative court last year which held carrier sanctions against airlines to be unlawful.

The SPD's turnaround has been condemned as a surrender to the forces of neo-nazism which have used the arrival of hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers as an excuse for widespread racist violence over the past two years.