Germany is considering deporting Afghan migrants who endanger public security back to Afghanistan, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser told reporters on Tuesday. Her remarks follow the fatal stabbing of a policeman by a 25-year-old Afghan at an anti-Islam event. The federal prosecutor has now picked up the case on the grounds of a suspected Islamist motive.

While liberals, social democrats, conservatives and the far-right AFD support the plans to deport convicted migrants to Afghanistan, the Green party opposes the move, objecting that deportations would be logistically near impossible since Germany does not have bilateral relations with the Taliban. Deporting would mean recognizing and securing a deal with the Taliban, and thus paying money to the Islamist scene, which would be counterproductive to the overall aim, warns Greens Chairman Omid Nouripour.

According to police statistics, violent crime reached a 15-year-high this year and surged a further 8.6 per cent in 2023. Faeser said, “It is clear that persons who pose a threat to public safety in Germany need to be deported quickly. The security interest in Germany outweighs the interest of the people affected”.

Furthermore, there are legal obstacles in the way of developing such a policy as Germany stopped deporting people to Afghanistan since the Taliban took power in 2021. Asylum Law expert Daniel Thym explains that the base of this lies in Asylum Law, specifically the principle of non-refoulment. The principle makes it illegal to deport people to countries where they might face death or prosecution. Another layer of difficulty comes with the fact that deportees might face hunger in most of the country’s regions.

In the case of the Mannheim perpetrator, the authorities would have to evaluate whether there would be a safe place for the culprit, or if he might even escape punishment in Afghanistan because of his suspected Islamist background. In that sense, before the practical barrier of realizing this, there is a legal one that needs to be overcome.