Migrants who have already been convicted and are required to leave the country have also been included in a controversial Cologne right of residence project. A review showed that there were criminal charges for 130 people from the program in 2024, said city director Dörte Diemert. There have been convictions against 79 of these people in the past. The NRW refugee ministry had asked the city to examine individual cases.
The reason for this was a list from the Central Immigration Office (ZAB) in Coesfeld, on which the names of these people appear. In 2024, the ZAB offered the Cologne immigration authority to obtain the necessary travel documents for 471 people from Western Balkan states who were required to leave the country. However, the city administration rejected this support to prepare for deportations. 218 of these people were in the right to remain project.
The city's legal office has now examined the entire process under the direction of Diemert. Examination of the files showed that a total of 77 of the 130 criminally suspected people were excluded from the project - 34 of them because they received a prison sentence of more than six months and thus exceeded the threshold for inclusion in the program. The exclusion rules were implemented to a large extent and in a reasonable time, said Diemert.
However, 29 cases were also identified in which the examiners could not clearly understand why the person had not yet been excluded. There is a need for action here.
Mayor Torsten Burmester (SPD) said that the right to remain project should offer people who cannot be repatriated a perspective. “But it is also clear that a right-to-stay program must not be a protection program against the consequences of our law.” Legally convicted criminals have no place in such a program. “If the current administrative regulations do not sufficiently guarantee this, we have to change these rules.”
According to Diemert, the check also showed that a missing passport was the only obstacle to leaving the country for only 26 of the 471 people on the “Coesfeld list”. For the other 445 people, there were further reasons for toleration. This means that the majority of people could not have been easily deported even if the ZAB had provided them with replacement passport documents.
Overall, it can be stated that “the procedures of the immigration authority in the context of the individual case review were largely comprehensible despite existing documentation deficiencies,” the auditors summarize in their approximately 90-page report. There was no attitude of refusal or fundamental systemic mismanagement of administrative practice.
However, there is a need for adjustments to the internal processes of the immigration authority, said Diemert. Some service instructions need to be updated and file management needs to be improved. The ZAB's request was not answered completely and consistently.
In Burmester's opinion, the problem of dealing with migrants who are obliged to leave the country goes far beyond Cologne. He therefore announced that he wanted to use the events surrounding the “Coesfelder List” as an opportunity to discuss options for a “practical right of residence”. To this end, he will invite representatives from the state, federal government, municipal umbrella organizations and immigration authorities to a conference in Cologne.
