In our last two articles (here and here), we explored how the German state prosecutes politically active Palestinians outside the judicial system. This week’s column focuses on how the federal court and the BAMF worked hand in hand to fulfil Germany’s Staatsräson.
“Who has the right to have rights?” asked Mahmoud Khalil after he was kidnapped by US law enforcement and threatened with deportation in spring 2025. Far from being confined to the past, this question remains essential today.
Precisely because those with rights certainly do not include Abdallah, whose citizenship was revoked due to an Instagram post. They also do not include Khaled or B.M., two Palestinian organisers who are deliberately targeted and placed under severe pressure by asylum, citizenship, and residency laws. Nor do they include the refugees from Gaza whose experiences of genocide continue to be questioned by police officers, judges, and others in society in support of the German Staatsräson.
Altogether, their cases are an expression of a broader development, even if the “right to have rights” has never truly applied to everyone. Moreover, it has always been administered by imperialist and genocidal states and their accomplices, however they see fit, in service of their particular profit-driven interests.
In Germany, it is a development that significantly escalated during the genocide in Palestine. The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) is at the forefront of repression against Palestinians. In January 2024, it decided to freeze any asylum applications from Gazans. Defining the genocide in Gaza as a “situation of temporary uncertainty”, it deliberately ignored Israel’s openly stated intent to erase Palestinians. In reaction to the BAMF’s inactivity, 238 lawsuits have been filed.
In April 2025, seeking an escape from legal limbo, the Federal Administrative Court (BverwG) responded. The majority of Palestinians coming from Gaza arrive via Greece. Previously impermissible, the court ruled that deportations to Greece were now permissible for a specific group of people; according to the judges, “unaccompanied, non-vulnerable, able-bodied male beneficiaries of protection” can meet their most basic living needs in Greece themselves, through “simple or only temporarily available work, even within the so-called shadow or niche economy”.
Three months later, the BAMF decided to suspend the January 2024 freeze. Only after Germany was able to remove those applying for asylum did it seemingly reimplement the right to asylum on paper. Following the 2025 court ruling, some Gazans—mostly from the Lager in Eisenhüttenstadt and a few from Saxony-Anhalt—have since been deported to Greece. Together, the federal court and the BAMF worked hand in hand to fulfil Germany’s political agenda.
Since then, the only way to avoid deportation to Greece and obtain subsidiary protection or asylum has been to prove mental or physical illness. In doing so, people are forced to shed their resilience and allow themselves to be designated as vulnerable and in need of protection. As such, the collective traumatic experience of the genocide of their people continues to be denied, depoliticised, and individualised. Palestinians’ resilience is being torn apart in a dehumanising manner in front of German courts, judges, and bureaucrats.
It is fair to say that there is no “right to have rights” in Germany. On the contrary, rights are granted and revoked according to the state’s political agenda. In Germany, more than anywhere else, this agenda is fundamentally tied to the Israeli settler-colonial project in Palestine.
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The Palestine Legal Fund 3ezwa supports those who face residency issues related to their support for Palestine. You can contact them or visit the counselling hours in Berlin, Munich or Leipzig to seek help.
