100 days of CEAS reform: Locked up at the airport

It has been around 100 days since the reform of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) came into force. On Monday, Pro Asyl took stock of the situation. The dramatic effects of the stricter rules for refugees are already evident.

The CEAS reform includes a variety of changes that affect all of Europe. Pro Asyl now focused on Germany and in particular on the so-called border procedures that are used for people who enter the country by plane. They are detained directly at the airport for up to three months, during which their asylum application is examined. If their application is rejected, they may be detained for another three months until deportation. The condition is that those affected come from countries with a protection rate of less than 20 percent and do not show any particular vulnerability.

This is exactly what seems to be being circumvented in practice, as can be seen from the Pro Asyl report. There is, for example, a trans woman from Uzbekistan who arrived at Berlin-Brandenburg Airport in June. Although she described having a chronic illness and being a victim of human trafficking, she had to stay in the closed facility at BER.

According to Pro Asyl, the woman received neither appropriate medical care nor sufficient care during her stay there. The personal hearing at the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) took place after ten days; she was only allowed to enter the country with the help of legal support and was later recognized as a refugee.

Then there is a Georgian couple with two children aged 11 and 16. They arrived at Munich Airport in June 2026. The woman was then taken into inpatient psychiatric treatment, but this did not mean that she was legally released from the border procedure.

As long as those seeking protection are accommodated in the border process and at the airport, they are considered not to have entered the country, even though they are actually here. The “fiction of non-entry” is the name of this legal construct, which applies even if those affected are moved between different facilities within Germany by car.

In the meantime, the BAMF decided to reject the Georgian couple's asylum application as "obviously unfounded", although the two were initially not deported because of the woman's illness. The family was only allowed to enter Germany two months after arriving in Munich because the administrative court decided that the mother could not remain in the border procedure because of her mental illness and that the family could not be separated.

As tough as these cases are, initial figures from the federal government also show that so far only very few people have gone through the border procedure at the airport. There were a total of 36 people affected from June to August. In fact, airlines are legally obliged not to allow passengers on board without a visa for the destination country, which means that refugees have little chance of even flying into Germany.

Instead, the vast majority of refugees continue to come to Germany overland. It is not the border procedure that applies here, but rather the so-called Dublin procedure. This is intended to determine where those affected first entered EU soil in order to bring them back there. The extent to which this practice has changed since the CEAS reform cannot yet be predicted.

Those who are not deported according to the Dublin rules but are allowed to stay will face fast-track proceedings in the future following the CEAS reform. However, as with the border procedure at the airport, the condition for this is that the person comes from a country with a protection rate of less than 20 percent and does not show any particular vulnerability.

According to the federal government's response to a request from the Left Party, this is already being used on a large scale. According to this, more than half of all applications were processed in accelerated asylum procedures in the first few months. The options for defending yourself against rejection are significantly limited. In addition, critics fear that due to time pressure, the review will only be superficial.