News & Resources
On 23 June 2025, IRAP Europe testified at an expert hearing at the German Parliament against a new law seeking to suspend family reunification for beneficiaries of subsidiary protection for two years. Under German and EU law, subsidiary protection is granted to people facing serious harm if returned to their country of origin, including torture or threats to life due to armed conflict. This includes many displaced people from Syria, Eritrea, and Afghanistan. Under the previous law, beneficiaries of subsidiary protection were eligible for family reunification in Germany, although only up to 1,000 visas per month could be issued.
At the hearing, IRAP Europe’s Dr. Corinna Ujkašević, who had submitted an expert opinion to Parliament in advance, strongly advised against the planned suspension, citing concerns about the law’s conformity with the right to respect for private and family life as guaranteed under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and Article 6 of the German Constitution. “The proposed law has such considerable shortcomings,” Dr. Ujkašević maintained at the hearing, “that it would prove unlawful if adopted.”
In particular, Dr. Ujkašević argued that both European and German law require the government to give applicants effective access to an individual assessment of their family reunification applications even during the time of suspension. As part of the assessment, the family’s interest in reunification – including factors such as the duration of the family separation and the best interests of the child – must be appropriately weighed against the state’s interest to regulate immigration.
While the German government argued that such assessments could take place within the framework of an existing statutory hardship provision, Dr. Ujkašević showed that this provision is highly ineffective and lacks transparency. She stressed that the current hardship provision “does not guarantee effective access to an individual case review and therefore contradicts the requirements of the ECHR. These specify that the rights enshrined in the Convention must be guaranteed not only in theory, but also practically and effectively.”
Dr. Ujkašević highlighted that, in the past, the government has not provided applicants with any information on how they can obtain access to an individual case review under this provision. Moreover, the hardship provision has so far only been applied in highly exceptional cases and is therefore too narrow to meet the requirements of Article 8 of the ECHR and Article 6 of the German Constitution as established in rulings of the European Court of Human Rights and the German Constitutional Court. Between January 2017 and July 2018, during a period when family reunification was previously suspended, only 280 applicants were issued a visa under this provision. Dr. Ujkašević also urged Parliament to include in the law an exception for already-pending family reunification applications, some of which have been pending for years.
Despite these warnings of illegality, the German Parliament passed the law that same week. It came into force on 24 July 2025, suspending family reunification for all beneficiaries of subsidiary protection for two years, while leaving only narrow room for individual case assessments in cases of exceptional hardship.
The new law will directly affect a number of IRAP Europe’s clients, in many cases prolonging their waiting time to be reunited with their families to five years or more. For example, it will further prolong the separation of teenage Eritrean girls Delina and Saron Berhane from their mother Tsion*, who was forced to flee Eritrea ten years ago after being threatened by the country’s military regime. Tsion applied for asylum in Germany in 2017 and received subsidiary protection status in 2019. After waiting for more than three years for an appointment at the German embassy in Ethiopia, the family were only able to submit their family reunification applications in 2023. The embassy denied the applications in early 2025 because Delina and Saron, like many other children of Eritrean refugees, were unable to fulfil the embassy’s strict requirements for state-issued identity documents. IRAP Europe filed a lawsuit challenging this unlawful rejection months before the suspension of family reunification came into effect. While the prospects of success for the family were initially promising, they are now uncertain as a result of the suspension law. At this point, Delina and Saron have been waiting for more than eight years to be reunited with their mother in Germany.
IRAP Europe will challenge the application of the suspension law to our clients’ cases before the German courts and is committed to engaging in further strategic litigation on this issue.
*Clients’ names have been changed to protect their identities.