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Establishing Identity for International Protection and Return Measures: Challenges and Practices ,
Source: BAMF
The experience in many (Member) States is that only a small minority of third-country nationals provide documents substantiating their identity when they apply for international protection. Those who flee persecution often do not have the possibility to take their identity documents with them when leaving their country of origin. Some of those who apply for protection may not want to reveal the identity by which they are known to the authorities in the country of origin, for valid fears or other reasons. It also appears that in some cases migrants are advised to destroy their identification documents upon arriving in the EU. Moreover, when third-country nationals do provide identity documents as part of their application for international protection, these documents are sometimes considered false or otherwise invalid by the responsible authorities in the Member States. These issues evidently limit the authorities’ ability to assess the validity of the applicant’s claims and to make decisions in these cases. A challenge of a future Common European Asylum System (CEAS) is: “to verify the identity of the applicant in order to produce a legally correct decision based on the facts and circumstances in the individual case.
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This report prepared by the German EMN National Contact Point on the Europe-wide study describes the problems and challenges facing Germany in this regard. The reports prepared by the other contact points are available on the EU website, which can be accessed via the link on the right-hand side.