"Lower Saxony is the province which is most hostile to refugees in Germany”

As "the province which is most hostile to refugees in Germany” beside Bavaria the General Secretary of the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) Tilman Zülch termed the province of Lower Saxony. "Since the CDU/FDP coalition took office Lower Saxony’s Minister of the Interior Uwe Schünemann under the aegis of Prime Minister Christian Wulff has done everything possible to chase out refugees who have been in the country for many years”, criticised the human rights worker. Schünemann has seen no cause for concern in tearing families and married couples apart, in deporting pregnant mothers without their husbands and in separating brothers and sisters. In most cases it has been a matter of families of very different, mostly discriminated ethnic and religious communities from areas in which war and genocide are raging, who have been in Germany for eight to twenty years. The Minister of the Interior is evidently specially interested in driving out children – who have been "Germanified” in terms of language and culture - by the hundred from a country in which the number of children is rapidly diminishing.

For this reason the GfbV is grateful to the SPD for standing up for better conditions concerning the integration of some 180,000 refugees who have been in the country for many years. At the same time the human rights organisation recalls that it had constantly to fight against outbursts of xenophobia towards Russians of German extraction with the – successful – campaign against them of the former Minister of the Interior Heiner Bartling (in office 1998 – 2003).

"The Society for Threatened Peoples does valuable work. We are proud of having their federal headquarters in Lower Saxony.”

Christian Wulff, Lower Saxon Prime Minister, on NDR TV, 11th April 2005, on the occasion of a GfbV vigil for Chechnya during the opening of the Hanover fair by Putin and Schröder