The Interior Minister of Lower Saxony Uwe Schünemann (CDU) yesterday proposed that only children of long-settled refugee families who "perform well at school" should be exempt from deportation back to the country of persecution. What he means is that Germany - according to recent statistics the country with the fewest children in Europe - should proceed to deport thousands of refugees and all their German-speaking children except only those children who are doing well at school. Tilman Zülch, General Secretary of Society for Threatened Peoples (STP), awarded the 1995 Lower Saxony Media Communications Prize and himself a refugee child in 1945, observes:

"The principle that the decision whether or not to deport a child should depend on performance at school obviously makes teachers complicit in the process. Schünemann's proposal is in violation of Article 3 (1) of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It was only on 15 July 2010 that the Federal Republic of Germany fully ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Interior Minister Schünemann appears not to have noticed. The Interior Minister needs to be reminded that Article 3 (1) of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child makes no provision for any exceptions. "In all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration."

The Interior Minister of Lower Saxony and his colleague Federal Minister Thomas de Maiziere, chair of the Conference of Interior Ministers, clearly also need reminding that the 20th of November has been celebrated since 1989 as International Children's Rights Day or World Children's Day. "It is shameful", Zülch considers, "that a decision to deny children's rights can be taken like this on the eve of World Children's Day."

Today, Monday, Society for Threatened Peoples will use its Consultative Status with the United Nations to call on the UN body responsible for monitoring compliance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Committee on the Rights of the Child, to carry out an urgent investigation of the intentions of the Interior Minister.

The human rights organisation recalls that Schünemann, Germany's most controversial Interior Minister, has already spent years destroying the lives of long-settled refugee families, separating fathers from mothers, parents from children and siblings from one another. Schünemann has been willing to allow even the severely ill, pregnant women and the elderly to be deported back to the prospect of "nothing". Many of his critics describe him as an extremist cowboy and his views as being close to those of Germany's National Democratic Party, the NPD.

Tilman Zülch can be contacted at 0151-15309888.

This press release will be circulated on Monday to the Federal German teachers' associations.