Row deepens over Germany’s deportation of Tunisian

Sami Aidoudi, a 42-year-old Tunisian man, was supposed to disappear from Germany last month – permanently.

After a legal tug of war, the father of four was bundled on to a plane at dawn on July 13th and flown back to his homeland. Case closed on a suspected Islamist who had become a tabloid sensation over claims he was a bodyguard to Osama bin Laden, founder of the al-Qaeda terrorist organisation.

The only problem was that the bin Laden link has never been proven and he was deported on an order that had been struck out hours earlier by a court.

On Wednesday evening, a German court ordered Aidoudi’s return – at taxpayer expense – and imposed a €40,000 fine on authorities for carrying out a “clearly illegal” deportation that was long-planned but apparently concealed from the court.

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“The case . . . throws up questions about democracy, the rule of law, in particular the separation of powers and effective legal protection,” said Justice Ricarda Brandt, president of North Rhine-Westphalia’s upper administrative court.

In an extraordinary attack, she said the “half-truths” in this case from politicians and officials meant her court colleagues would be wise not to believe them in the future. The ruling, and her strong words, only add to the woes of German politicians trying to balance the rule of law with security concerns.

For nine years, Aidoudi lived in the western German city of Bochum with his wife and four children. They lived on monthly welfare payments of €1,168, though his asylum application was refused because German intelligence classify him as a dangerous person for having trained in an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan in 2001.

He remained in the country because his lawyers argued, and courts agreed, that his reputation as an Islamist could see him face torture on return to Tunisia.

Court decision

With no diplomatic guarantee from Tunis that this would not happen, the court said last month it was obliged to strike out the deportation order. Only after Aidoudi was already in the air, however, was the court’s decision passed on to the officials who deported him.

Now a case that was already a political embarrassment in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Germany’s most populous state, is turning into a political disaster. Justice Brand accused state politicians of bending the law to fit public opinion, increasingly worried about an Islamist terror threat.

“The limits of the rule of law were clearly being tested,” she said of the unlawful deportation. But NRW state interior minister Herbert Reul, in a robust response, said “Judges should always keep in mind that their rulings reflect the population’s sense of justice”.

“I doubt in this matter if this is the case,” he said. When people no longer understood court rulings, he added, “this is grist to the mill of extremists”.

While the NRW state government has closed ranks, opposition politicians are incandescent at it for flouting of court orders and attacking judges. They want the resignation of state integration minister Joachim Stamp, who accepted political responsibility last month for a deportation he said “had met all legal conditions”.

Tremors spreading

Now that a court has ruled otherwise the tremors of this case may spread from Düsseldorf, the NRW state capital, across the country to Berlin.

While migration matters are a state competence, this deportation was carried out with the assistance of federal authorities. And federal interior minister Horst Seehofer backed his party political allies in Düsseldorf pushing the Aidoudi deportation.

Their push fitted his tough line on migration in recent weeks, as his own CSU party in Bavaria faces the loss of its absolute majority in an October state election. Seehofer insists he did not intervene in the Aidoudi deportation but is on the record describing it as legal and “politically important”.

Though not personally aware in advance of the planned unlawful deportation, he said, it was “possible” that the plan was known in his ministry.

It remains unclear when – or if – Aidoudi will return. Bochum has offered him a free flight if he secures a German visa and convinces Tunisia to let him leave. But a justice ministry spokesman in Tunis said this week: “In this case Tunisian law is applicable and nothing else.”