DeZIM Lunch Discussion | The Right to Counseling?

The federal government is considering discontinuing funding for independent asylum procedure counseling. The debate highlights a fundamental conflict of objectives in asylum policy. The aim is to organize asylum procedures more efficiently and to consolidate government structures. At the same time, the question arises as to how fair and constitutionally sound procedures can be guaranteed under these conditions.

Independent asylum procedure counseling has been established in recent years as a nationwide service to inform asylum seekers early on about their rights and obligations in the procedure and to support them in presenting their grounds for protection. It helps make procedures more transparent, reduce erroneous decisions, and identify particularly vulnerable individuals at an early stage. The debate over its future is emblematic of broader developments in migration and integration policy, in which existing structures are increasingly subject to changing financial and political conditions.

The current discussion is also part of comprehensive changes in European and German asylum and migration policy. With the reform of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), new legal amendments, and political demands for accelerated procedures, the institutional framework of the asylum system is changing significantly. This raises the question anew of what role independent counseling should play in the asylum system in the future, particularly in a system that is more strongly oriented toward control, acceleration, and early decisions.

The Lunch Discussion takes these developments as its starting point and contextualizes them from a migration studies perspective. Representatives from research, human rights institutions, and counseling organizations will discuss how the role of independent counseling is changing in the wake of current reforms and what function it can fulfill in a changing asylum system in the future.

The discussion will focus, among other things, on the following questions:

• What role does independent counseling play in the quality of asylum procedures?
• What impact would the elimination of funding have on asylum seekers, counseling structures, and state procedures?
• How are current reforms of European and German asylum policy changing the framework conditions for counseling?

• What institutional structures and forms of independent counseling are needed to ensure fair and constitutional asylum procedures even under changed conditions?

   

Contributors

• Dr. Zeynep Yanaşmayan, Head of the Migration Department, DeZIM Institute
• Anna Suerhoff, Research Associate, German Institute for Human Rights

• Kerstin Becker, Head of the Migration and International Cooperation Department, Der Paritätische Gesamtverband

   

Moderator

• Dr. Marcus Engler, Refugee and Migration Researcher, DeZIM Institute