Germany threatens immigrants with deportation for supporting terrorism

By Anne-Béatrice Clasmann, dpa I Wednesday, June 26, 2024

BERLIN – Local German immigration authorities will be able to more easily deport immigrants who have been deemed to express support for terrorism under a draft bill approved by the Cabinet on Wednesday.

According to the text, deportation will be possible if someone is considered to have approved of a single terrorist offence. A criminal conviction would not be required to deport an individual.

Expressing approval could include not only the posting of such content on social media networks, but also the marking of a post by “liking” it on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram or TikTok.

Germany’s coalition government has framed the changes as a reaction to hateful posts made online following the October 7 attacks in Israel and a deadly knife attack on an anti-Islam rally in Mannheim, in which a policeman was killed.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz had announced plans to tighten the law in a government statement following the attack in Mannheim earlier this month.

Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, who put forward the changes, argued that the government is “taking tough action against Islamist and anti-Semitic hate crime online.”

Critics in the opposition decried the draft as an effect to clamp down on free speech and likened the measures to tactics employed by authoritarian regimes.

“The fact that Interior Minister Faeser is now apparently planning to deport people because of a post on social media” is the culmination of a worrying trend, said Clara Bünger of the hard-left Linke Party in parliament.

Bünger said that persecution and imprisonment of people for a simple “like” on social media in countries like Turkey and Russia rightly draws outraged condemnation from German politicians – “however, Germany itself has long been moving in this direction.”

Experts in German immigration law also questioned the proposal.

Thomas Oberhäuser, the chairman of the working group on migration law in the German Bar Association (DAV), said the draft law was legally dubious.

“You have to develop a lot of legal imagination to define the posting of a ‘like’ as dissemination” of hateful speech or support for terrorism, said the lawyer.

It is also often difficult for laypersons to immediately recognize whether or not a particular case involves terrorist content, he said.

As an example, he pointed to the recent controversy involving the Geraldine Rauch, the president of the Technical University of Berlin. Rauch has been criticized because she “liked” a post on X critical of Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip which included a photo of demonstrators holding up a picture of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a swastika painted on it.

Rauch apologized and explained that she had liked the post because of its text and had not taken a closer look at the details of the image posted underneath.

Oberhäuser also called it “completely insane” to imagine that immigration authorities would be able to check for “liked” posts on social media on a large scale.

The national chairman of the police union, Jochen Kopelke, welcomed the Cabinet’s decision, which he described as a clear signal to terror sympathizers.

However, he said that the police and all other authorities must also be equipped in such a way to enforce and prosecute the law.

Andrea Lindholz of the opposition conservative CDU/CSU bloc, meanwhile, criticized the draft for not going further and giving the state greater powers to crack down on Islamist demostrators.

“In view of the mass anti-Semitism and pro-caliphate demonstrations on German streets, every anti-Semitic and anti-democratic offence must regularly lead to deportation,” she said.

Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck of the Greens expressed support for the draft deportation law.

“It is a great achievement and strength of our country that persecuted people can find protection in Germany,” he said.

However, Habeck contended that anyone who mocks the country’s basic democratic order by cheering on terrorism and celebrating murders has forfeited their right to stay, and argued it’s appropriate to change the country’s residency laws accordingly.

“Islam belongs to Germany, Islamism does not,” Habeck added.