HRW says situation in Germany for migrants has worsened

The living situation for immigrants and their descendants in Germany has worsened, the rights watchdog Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Wednesday.

“Increases in regressive migration and asylum policies, hate crimes and hate speech, and restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly raised serious concerns,” the rights group wrote in its report on Germany.

“The political rhetoric of the AfD had increasingly been adopted by democratic parties,” Almaz Teffera, an HRW researcher on racism, said in Berlin at the presentation of the organization’s latest annual report.

She was referring to Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, whose central platform calls for stricter immigration laws.

Teffera said it was harmful to first label people with a migration background as a problem, but then insist that the “good migrants who work hard here” were of course not meant.

When it comes to foreign policy, both the previous centre-left coalition government and the current centre-right one had squandered moral “credit” internationally and thereby lost influence, said HRW Germany director Philipp Frisch.

The “almost unconditional support of the German government for the government in Israel” in the face of systematic attacks on the Palestinian civilian population in the Gaza Strip is the reason for this.