Germany will stop deporting asylum seekers to Greece until June 2026 when new European Union asylum rules enter into force.
Today, German interior minister Alexander Dobrindt confirmed earlier information from the Greek migration ministry.
The Greeks had announced they had agreed with Germany and other EU states that until mid-2026 they would not have to accept back any more asylum seekers who had entered the EU through Greece and travelled on to other countries.
Dobrindt said all asylum seekers who come to Germany via Greece until next June would instead have their applications processed in Germany.
“As part of an overall compromise we will no longer try to conduct these transfers but instead hold the [asylum] procedures here”, Dobrindt told newspaper Welt.
On December 8, after a summit of EU interior ministers in Brussels, Dobrindt had proudly announced that Greece and Italy had consented to taking back migrants from Germany.
In exchange, these countries will benefit from a better protection of the EU’s outer borders as well as a so-called “solidarity pool” through which other EU states have agreed to accept 21,000 asylum seekers from Greece in 2026 alone.
Germany will be exempt from taking in refugees from this pool until mid-2027 according to Dobrindt.
This will only apply after June 12, 2026, though, when the EU’s new Asylum and Migration Pact enters into force.
The new regulations give nations such as Germany more time to return asylum seekers to the countries where they had first entered the EU – typically Greece or Italy.
Under the current regime, the EU’s Dublin Regulation, all refugees who applied for asylum in an EU state other than the one they had first entered EU territory were to be returned to this country within six months.
In practice, the German administration usually failed to return refugees to Greece, Italy and other countries within this deadline, allowing them to stay in Germany.
Between 2020 and April 2024, around 100,000 asylum seekers came to Germany via Greece. The great majority of them have been allowed to stay in Germany.
