EUAA support at the BAMF enhances European cooperation , Date: 2025.03.12, format: Report, area: Asylum and refugee protection

Achieving more together is the aspiration behind the support in asylum and migration which the EU’s Member States have been providing one another for many years. These support activities are coordinated by the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA). The Agency is mandated to ease the burden on the EU’s Member States when it comes to transposing the EU’s legal provisions on asylum and international protection, amongst other things by offering technical and operational assistance.

In the past, this has led to Germany regularly seconding staff from the BAMF to other EU Member States such as Greece, Lithuania, or most recently Romania. Germany too has however been faced with consistently high asylum volumes in recent years, as well as an increasing number of what are referred to as Dublin cases. The latter primarily entail an examination of which country is responsible for actually processing an asylum application, as the “country of first entry”.

Against the background of a consistently high migration volume, Germany lodged its first own support application to the EUAA in 2024. Once a detailed analysis had been carried out to ascertain what was needed, EUAA Executive Director Nina Gregori and the Vice President of the BAMF Dr Michael Griesbeck signed a coordinated deployment plan in June 2024.

As soon as only two months later, the BAMF was able to welcome the first specialists from a variety of European asylum and migration authorities to the Dublin division in Berlin. Their deployment is intended to last until the end of 2025, and is to focus in particular on outgoing requests for information and for re-transfer.

As well as directly easing burdens, close cooperation provides valuable incentives: "Working together with European colleagues promotes an intensive, extremely enriching exchange of specialist knowledge and best practices. This means that EUAA support deployments constitute a special example of practical European solidarity and cooperation in these challenging times", as the BAMF’s Vice President Dr Michael Griesbeck said.