"A Light for Our Refugee Children - so that they can stay”

Citizens in 20 towns (to date) all over Germany will this Thursday (17th Dec.) be going out on the street to call for permanent residence permits to be issued to refugees who have been living in Germany for many years with temporary permits. Under the motto "A Light for Our Refugee Children – so that they can stay” the Society for Threatened Peoples STP (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker GfbV) has called out to candlelight vigils in front of town halls, churches or squares in town centres to draw attention to the fate of the approximately 100,000 refugees who have been living for many years in Germany and are still threatened with deportation. During the vigils signatures are to be collected for an appeal to the federal government and the ministers of the interior of central and local government for these people and their children to be given at last a permanent future in their new homeland.

"While many of us are looking forward to a merry Christmas with family and friends the refugee children and their parents with temporay residence permits must be prepared to be deported at any time. The conference of ministers of the interior at the beginning of December has hardly changed anything”, said the chairperson of the STP, Tilman Zülch. These people, who have been our neighbours here for six, eight, 15 years or even 20, need us now! For years our offices for foreigners have held them in suspense through the inhuman practice of meting out the so-called "chain exceptional leave to remain”. They are forced by residence regulations to stay put in a certain area. In these circumstances, what chance have they of finding work? And now the idea is to get rid of them, even at the expense of tearing husbands from wives, parents from their children and brothers and sisters from each other.”

Deportation means for the adults a forced return to a state from which they had to flee for their lives. For children and young people deportation to the unknown country of their forebears is a catastrophe, warns the STP. Germany has been their home, German their mother-language and here they have been living with their pals and school-friends. Deportation for the refugee children would be "deportation into nothingness”. All the good work put in by teachers, social workers, and others who done their best to help with the integration and training of these children would be wasted.

In the following towns vigils are being organised this Thursday, 17th December (exceptions in brackets), mostly from 5 to 6p.m. The title is "A

Light for Our Refugee Children - so that they can stay”:

Altötting (19.12.), Bad Säckingen, Bielefeld, Berlin, Bremen, Darmstadt, Düsseldorf, Göttingen, Hamburg (19.12.), Hannover, Karlsruhe, Kiel, Koblenz, Konstanz, Münster, Paderborn, Rastede, Solingen, Weimar, Wiesloch

The Chairperson of the STP, Tilman Zülch, will be happy to provide further information at politik@gfbv.de