By Ayla Albayrak, The Wall Street Journal
“I am not safe in Afghanistan,” the 22-year-old told the judge. “The Taliban threatened to kill me because I was a soldier in the Afghan army.”
The Afghan man, who asked through his lawyer not to be named, was appealing the rejection of his asylum application. But his case wouldn’t be settled that day. The judge—a criminal-law expert drafted two months earlier to help work through a backlog of similar cases—postponed the decision at the lawyer’s request.
Such scenes are playing daily in courts throughout the country. A steep surge in lawsuits by migrants to reverse asylum decisions, fend off deportation threats or obtain more financial support is gumming up the German justice system.
The avalanche of complaints is the latest example of how the inflow of more than a million asylum seekers since early 2015 continues to test Germany’s institutions, from schools to job centers, long after the refugee crisis reached its peak and began receding.
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