Germany is set to strip rejected asylum seekers of their automatic right to a lawyer in a bid to speed up deportations.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz will scrap a rule that offers legal support to asylum seekers awaiting to be deported, The Telegraph reports.
Merz’s allies claimed that the law – which had been passed by a previous government – was being used to cause delays in deportation cases.
Senior MP from Merz’s Christian Democrats party told The Telegraph: ‘We want the rate of deportations to increase, but many deportations fail due to people going into hiding or due to various legal and practical obstacles.’
MPs have raised concerns that these delays increase the risk of asylum seekers going into hiding.
The proposed new law has sparked controversy in Germany, with some experts warning that it could result in asylum seekers being unlawfully detained.
German refugee rights group, Pro Asyl, has condemned the proposal as undemocratic and ‘constitutionally questionable’.
But Germany’s interior ministry defended plans to scrap the mandatory legal support of asylum seekers, claiming that they would remove ‘obstacles which keep us from preventing illegal migration’.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz will scrap a rule that offers legal support to asylum seekers awaiting to be deported
German police check people arriving from France at the German-French border on September 16, 2024 in Kehl, Germany
During Merz’s election campaign, he made reducing immigration a top policy on his agenda, and he went on to revoke Merkel’s order on his first day in office
‘Such mandatory legal representation, which was introduced under the previous government, was an attempt to prevent people who were required to leave the country from being deported, even after all other administrative and court procedures and possibilities for appeal had found that they had no right to remain in Germany’, the ministry said.
The proposed new law is part of a wider package of reforms on migration, which was approved by Merz’s cabinet in June.
Germany’s new government has already placed curbs on migration including suspending family reunification and resettlement programmes, as it seeks to regain support from voters drawn to the far-right Alternative for Germany, which made historic gains in February’s federal election.
The package is expected to be soon put to a vote in the German parliament.
But Merz’s party want deportation proceedings to be fast-tracked, as they face pressure to respond to recent terror attacks committed by migrants who had no legal right to be in Germany.
The country has suffered three deadly terror attacks over the past year which were committed by rejected asylum seekers form Syria and Afghanistan in the cities of Solingen, Aschaffenburg and Munich.
The reforms come almost a decade after former German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the country’s borders to nearly a million refugees fleeing war and persecution, a landmark decision that reshaped European politics.
She country granted protection to 3.5 million refugees, including many fleeing civil war in Syria , and about around 1.2 million Ukrainians seeking safety from Russia ‘s full-scale invasion.
September will mark the tenth anniversary of the peak of the European migration crisis, when then-Chancellor Merkel announced she would keep Germany ’s borders open to more than a million asylum seekers over the following year
Migrants get into a German Federal Police (Bundespolizei) vehicle, near Forst, eastern Germany on October 11, 2023, after a patrol at the border with Poland
Nigerian woman and her two children are escorted by German federal police officers after being required to disembark from a tourist bus at the Kiefersfelden border control station in southern Germany, upon entering from Austria on May 9, 2025
But Merkel’s open border policy was scrapped by Merz, who issued orders to turn undocumented migrants away from the nation.
Earlier this week, German cities reported an easing of the national immigration ’emergency’ after asylum claims were cut by half amid Merz’s crackdown.
Since the start of 2025, there were 61,336 new asylum applications, half as many as were recorded over the same period last year.
And now, Germany has lost its title as the EU’s prime destination for asylum seekers, having fallen behind Spain and France.
Towns have recorded a significant drop in pressure on public services since the country’s immigration policy shifted, according to the Association of German Cities, which represents about 3,200 municipal authorities across the nation.
‘In some towns there were still emergency accommodation facilities in tents, because otherwise there wouldn’t have been places for [the asylum seekers] to stay. Now this kind of emergency accommodation can in some cases be dismantled,’ Christian Schuchardt, the organisation’s director, told Augsburger Allgemeine.
The reasons behind the drop in the arrival of asylum seekers are disputed. While Merz’s government has claimed credit – citing its stringent border measures as an effective deterrent – some suggest the figures had already begun to drop before he took office in May.
Allies of Olaf Scholz, the former chancellor of Germany, say the tide was already turning under the centre-left politician’s leadership, due to his policies which included steps to turn away several categories of asylum seekers, and the deployment ‘temporary’ controls across the nation’s entire land border.
But data suggests that the figures have less to do with Germany’s policies and more to do with broader patterns in the geopolitics of the EU – where irregular crossings into the bloc as a whole fell by 38 per cent last year, according to Frontex.