Since the beginning of autumn, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Saxony (Germany) has already organized two charter flights to Tbilisi to send Georgian citizens to their home countries, who were denied refugee status in Germany.
In 2018, 2976 asylum applications from Georgian citizens were registered in Germany. Most of them, according to the Georgian embassy, ??are filed in two federal states - Saxony and North Rhine - Westphalia, reports DW.
The share of positive decisions on applications from Georgian citizens does not exceed one percent.. To speed up the process of reviewing applications for asylum from Georgian citizens, the German government plans to add Georgia to the list of "safe" countries - however, this decision has not yet been made at an official level..
According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Saxony, currently there are 511 citizens of Georgia in the federal state who are refused asylum and are obliged to leave Germany.
Georgian Ambassador to Germany Elguja Khokrishvili noted that the overwhelming majority of applications from Georgian citizens for asylum in Germany are unfounded. According to him, the Georgian government immediately responded to a growing number of such statements - and not only in Germany, but also in the European Union as a whole - and developed a package of legislative and practical responses.. They will include, in particular, an information campaign, criminal prosecution for facilitating illegal migration, strengthening of control when leaving the country.
According to the embassy of Georgia, these efforts gave a positive result.. As of September 2018, the number of asylum claims has decreased by 77 percent compared with January.. "It gives hope for further improvement of the situation," the ambassador said.
What is happening in Saxony stimulates the growth of demand for translators from Georgian. According to the Ministry of Justice of Saxony, the proportion of foreign prisoners in the prisons of federal land is growing:
at the moment almost a third of prisoners are foreigners. Moreover, Georgia ranks fourth in the number of prisoners in Saxon prisons, passing only Poland, Tunisia and Libya ahead. As a result, local budget expenditures on translators over the past three years have increased fivefold: from 104 thousand euros in 2015 to the projected 534 thousand euros in 2018. Georgian is among those for which there is a consistently high demand at the 24-hour hotline on-call interpreters for police, courts and hospitals..