Austria to propose EU asylum shake-up German neo-Nazi jailed for murder “
VIENNA Austrias interior minister Herbert Kickl said on Tuesday he would push to change the EUs migration policy so it is no longer possible to make asylum requests on European soil.
That would be a proposal, the minister of the far-right FPOE party told journalists in Vienna.
Any other solution, he argued, would encourage traffickers to say: take your money to bring you to the European Union because you are guaranteed the right to make a request for asylum, with a very, very weak probability of being sent back.
Austria currently holds the rotating EU presidency, which gives it the opportunity to chair meetings and set agendas as the bloc grapples to find a common migrant policy.
In the Austrian proposal, asylum requests would be made in refugee camps outside Europe to a sort of mobile commission, Kickl said.
Only exiles from countries that directly border the European Union would be able to make their asylum requests on EU territory.
The issue of migration and asylum rights in Europe has raised tensions among the 28 member states and will be on the agenda of a meeting of EU interior ministers today in Innsbruck.
In the short term, Kickl hopes to propose to his colleagues to establish return centres in willing countries outside the EU, for people refused asylum who could not be immediately repatriated to their country of origin.
The proposed changes to asylum rules have been developed in a draft document of the Austrian presidency dated earlier this month, which has been published in the press these last few days.
The draft claims that among asylum seekers, a lot of them are particularly drawn to ideologies that are hostile to freedom or which are prone to violence.
It proposes to grant asylum only to those who respect the values of the EU and its rights and fundamental liberties. AFP MUNICH A member of a German neo-Nazi gang was jailed for life yesterday for her part in the murders of 10 people during a seven-year campaign of racially-motivated violence.
Beate Zschaepe, 43, was part of the National Socialist Underground (NSU), whose members killed eight Turks, a Greek citizen and a German policewoman, the Higher Regional Court in Munich ruled.
The judges said she bore particularly heavy guilt and handed her their heaviest sentence at the end of one of the most closely watched court cases in Germanys post-war history.
Zschaepe had denied any knowledge of the murders during the five-year trial. But she said later she regretted not stopping two male members of the gang, Uwe Boehnhardt and Uwe Mundlos, from carrying out the killings.
Those men killed themselves in 2011 when police discovered the gang by chance.
Prosecutors said she had played a key role behind the scenes, planning the killings and arranging money and alibis.
The murders shook a country that believed it had learned
This is a just punishment for the NSUs cold-blooded and unprecedented series of crimes. JOACHIM HERRMAN BAVARIAN INTERIOR MINISTER
the lessons of its past. A report in 2014 said police had massively underestimated the risk of far-right violence and that a series of missteps had allowed the cell to go undetected.
Appeal
This is a just punishment for the NSUs cold-blooded and unprecedented series of crimes, Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said in a statement.
Five of the ten murders took place in Bavaria, the most violent attacks of their kind in Germany since the far-left Red Army Factions two-decade killing spree that ended in 1991 and left at least 34 dead.
What the perpetrators did cannot be made up for. The victims will never be forgotten, said German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas. He said Germany needed to tackle racist violence with diversity and the strength of law.
Zschaepes lawyer, Mathias Grasel, said he would appeal against yesterdays ruling.
The verdict is wrong! Grasel said in a statement.
Conviction for complicity is legally untenable. The fact is: Ms. Zschaepe was demonstrably present at no crime scene and never fired a weapon or detonated a bomb.
Turkeys foreign ministry said the trial had not uncovered the full story of the murder of its citizens and the other victims.
Unfortunately, the ruling made today has not brought to light the real criminals, the background of the NSU murders and the connection between the deep state and intelligence to its full extent, it said, without going into further detail. REUTERS