By Lamin Njie
Germany-based Gambian Abubacarr Sankanu has said that Germany doesn’t have to sign an agreement for it to be able to deport people.
The Gambia government is accused of signing a deal with the government of Germany for the most powerful nation in Europe to deport Gambian immigrants.
Sankanu who worked with the immgration and asylum department of the government of Germany exclusively told The Fatu Network that “anybody who comes to Germany without a visa, you’ve violated the law and that’s what many young people don’t understand.”
He said: “You enter the country without a visa, under normal circumstances you should be expelled. But why is it that our boys when they come they come they leave them? [It] is because of the Geneva Convention.
“If you come and say, ‘I have a problem in my country, I need protection.’ They give you that cover and you go through that legal process. If not, the moment you step on the territory without a visa you should be deported.”
According to Sankanu, while the debate rages as to whether the government signed an agreement, 90 percent of Gambians in Germany are not supposed to be in that country.
He said: “This deportation issue is not as easy as… People are talking about it. I stayed out of it because I’m in the centre of it. I know what is going on. The debate is that the government signed, the government did not sign. It’s about denial, it’s about credibility issues.
“My own observation would have been let us move the debate further because the issue is that 90 percent of who are there, if you are to tell the truth, they are not supposed to be in Germany.
“They have either exhausted their procedure for asylum or they have no reason to stay in the country. But because German law says you cannot deport someone to a country with poor human rights record under Jammeh so many young boys.
“They call it Article 60. So that Article 60 of the German asylum law covered a lot of Gambians under Jammeh law. They had no reason to get asylum to stay in Germany but Germany gave them that protection because the law says you cannot deport somebody to a country where there is death penalty, where there is abuse of human right and that covered them. And now that Jammeh is gone, that protection is over.”
