VIENNA (Reuters) – Austria’s caretaker government said on Monday it had ordered a halt to the processing of asylum applications by Syrians after rebels seized Damascus and President Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia after 13 years of civil war.
The civil war forced millions of Syrians to flee the country. They were a large proportion of the more than a million people who their way to Germany and neighbouring Austria during the European migration crisis of 2015 and 2016.
A public backlash against that influx continues to fuel support for Austria’s far right and conservatives.
“Chancellor Karl Nehammer today instructed Interior Minister Gerhard Karner to suspend all current Syrian asylum applications and to review all cases in which asylum was granted,” the Interior Ministry said in a statement.
Karner added: “I have instructed the Ministry to prepare a programme of orderly repatriation and deportation to Syria,” without elaborating on how that could be achieved.
Nehammer said on X on Sunday that the security situation in Syria should be reassessed to allow deportations to resume.
The ministry said it was also suspending family reunification, under which refugees’ families can join them. Syrians are the biggest group of asylum applicants in Austria by far, with 12,871 applications to date this year as of November.
Nehammer and Karner are from the conservative People’s Party (OVP), which has made a hard line on immigration similar to the far-right Freedom Party’s one of its hallmarks.
Nehammer is currently in coalition talks with two other parties aimed at forming a government without the Freedom Party (FPO) even though the FPO came first in September’s parliamentary election. The FPO would have needed a coalition partner to govern and none was immediately forthcoming.
Many voters, however, feel it was still unfair of President Alexander Van der Bellen not to formally task the FPO with forming a government.
The Interior Ministry said 12,886 asylum applications by Syrians had yet to be ruled on either in the first or second instance, 1,146 of which were based on family reunification.
(Reporting by Francois Murphy; Editing by Toby Chopra)
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