Germany continues to show the rest of Europe how to treat refugees

Germany took the international lead in efforts to resolve the European refugee crisis on Monday by declaring that all Syrian asylum-seekers are welcome to remain in Germany – no matter which EU country they had first entered.

The German federal office for migration and refugees ratified an order suspending the so-called “Dublin Protocol”.

All expulsion orders for Syrian asylum-seekers will be revoked. New Syrian arrivals will no longer be forced to fill in questionnaires to determine which country they had first arrived in.

The decision piles further pressure on other EU countries – including Britain – which have used the 1990 protocol as the legal basis for refusing to take any share of the refugees from the Middle East and Africa arriving into Europe to escape war, oppression or famine.

The decision came as chancellor Angela Merkel and the French president, François Hollande, held talks in Berlin to discuss the worst European refugee crisis since the aftermath of the Second World War. They appealed for a new, Europe-wide asylum policy, in which all 28 EU countries would take part.

Ms Merkel spoke of an “exceptional situation” which “is not going to end soon”. The German decision was also a direct snub to a series of far-right demonstrations against refugees in eastern Germany at the weekend.

The German decision to declare open house for Syrian refugees was welcomed by refugee support groups in Britain on Monday night as a political and moral lesson that the Government should follow.

The Refugee Council’s advocacy manager, Anna Musgrave, told the i paper: “This announcement from Germany is very significant… It’s high time the British Government made a similar statement.”

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