“This is not our tone”: This is how Wegner reacts to the asylum-related letter from Hamburg’s mayor

Berlin's Governing Mayor Kai Wegner ( CDU ) reacted with incomprehension to a fiery letter from his Hamburg counterpart , Peter Tschentscher ( SPD ), regarding the handling of church asylum. "Everyone decides for themselves how to use the wording in a letter," said Wegner and his Interior Senator Iris Spranger (SPD) in a statement. "This is not our tone," Senate spokeswoman Christine Richter told the Berliner Zeitung in response to an inquiry.

The background to this is a remarkably strict letter from the First Mayor of Hamburg, which the Berliner Zeitung reported on Wednesday . It is dated July 15, but according to Wegner and Spranger, only arrived at the Senate Chancellery this Thursday. In his letter, Tschentscher complains about an "abuse of church asylum" in the capital. Specifically, the SPD politician calls on the Berlin state government to extradite several people who are living in a church community to Hamburg. His city is responsible for their repatriation to Sweden. According to information from this newspaper, the people are Afghan nationals.

However, the Berlin police have so far rejected a corresponding request for administrative assistance, according to the letter from the Hamburg head of government. This was justified by a "political directive." The pastor of the Protestant Trinity Congregation in Berlin-Steglitz, which had taken in the Afghans, spoke of "three people in our church asylum, for whom the Hamburg immigration authorities are responsible."

Kai Wegner: Hamburg government stopped its own police

In their statement, Wegner and Spranger confirm a corresponding political directive stating that church asylum must be respected. Already on Wednesday, Interior Senator Spranger's spokeswoman said: "We are not violating church asylum."

The governments of the two city-states have apparently been discussing for some time the question of whose responsibility it is to remove the Afghans from the Berlin church congregation. "The Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg is solely responsible for the aforementioned cases of transfer under the Dublin III Regulation," say Wegner and Spranger. The Hamburg Office for Migration has requested that the Berlin police "expel, by way of administrative assistance, three people who were to be transferred to Sweden and are currently in church asylum in Berlin from church asylum and transport them to the ferry in Rostock." The Hamburg Office for Migration had previously obtained corresponding search warrants from the Berlin-Tiergarten District Court.

"Due to the directive in Berlin to respect church asylum, the request for administrative assistance was only granted to the extent that deportation outside the church premises was supported," Wegner and Spranger explain. Hamburg was offered the opportunity to conduct the searches with its own police forces. A high-ranking official in the Berlin Interior Ministry made a similar statement in an interview with the Berliner Zeitung: Thus, the Berlin police would have secured the outside area – but the Hamburg colleagues were ultimately unwilling to enter the sacred spaces of the church.

Berlin's Prime Minister Wegner and Interior Senator Spranger now claim that the operation was stopped by the Hamburg government: "The Hamburg police wanted to carry out the operation in Berlin accordingly, but shortly before the deadline, following intervention by the Hamburg Interior Ministry, they decided against a deployment in Berlin, meaning the transfer deadline has expired." This was Hamburg's sole decision. This means that Hamburg's Interior Senator, Andy Grote, like Tschentscher in the SPD, stopped the operation.

In his letter, Tschentscher complains that after the transfer deadline has expired, it is no longer Sweden but Germany that is responsible for the asylum procedures.