Germany kept a report used to justify post-Assad deportations to Syria confidential for nearly a year before quietly releasing it last week. It appears to contain inaccuracies. The post Why did Germany keep a report used to justify deportations to Syria a secret? appeared first on Syria Direct.
Germany kept a report used to justify post-Assad deportations to Syria confidential for nearly a year before quietly releasing it last week. It appears to contain inaccuracies.
30 March 2026
STUTTGART/BEIRUT — Since the fall of the Assad regime, European governments have been eagerly searching for ways to halt new asylum applications from Syrians in Europe, and to start deporting those without established residency.
In Germany, this included keeping its first post-Assad Country of Origin (COI) report for Syria—a government document relied upon when determining whether or not to grant asylum—secret for nearly a year.
European Union (EU) and national authorities regularly publish such reports to give an overview of the political and security situation in countries of origin. Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) references the documents when examining refugee applications and assessing whether asylum seekers can be deported in case of a rejection. Reports like these are also used by judges to uphold or overturn BAMF’s decisions.
However, for nearly a year, the German government decided to not publish its first report on Syria after the fall of the former regime. This meant that, contrary to common practice, Syrian asylum seekers could not easily access vital information used to determine whether they could stay in Europe.
After initially refusing a request by Syria Direct for access to the document, officials unexpectedly published the report, which was produced in March 2025, last week. An analysis by Syria Direct reveals that both it and a subsequent report prepared in November 2025 appear to contain outdated and inaccurate information.
Germany hosts Europe’s largest Syrian population, almost a million strong. As of October 2025, some 77,000 Syrians were awaiting a decision on their asylum cases. Only about five percent of these applications succeeded last year—as opposed to virtually all applications before Assad fell in December 2024. Meanwhile, some 10,000 Syrians have been issued with deportation orders.
On Monday, speaking after a meeting with Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa in Berlin, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said 80 percent of Syrians in Germany should return within three years, adding that conditions in the country have “fundamentally improved.”
Syria Direct originally requested access to the COI report in June 2025 under Germany’s Freedom of Information Act, which provides anyone with the right to access official information from the government. BAMF refused to release it, claiming it contained “facts and findings requiring confidentiality.”
It also said disclosing the report would allow Syrian asylum seekers to tailor their applications to it, “thereby undermining the fundamental right to asylum.”
“As a government agency, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees is responsible for upholding the legal system in its application of the fundamental right to asylum,” the reply stated. “The integrity of asylum proceedings would be jeopardized if asylum seekers were able to influence their statements by knowing the BAMF’s decision-making criteria to secure asylum.”
Therefore, “disclosure of the country report could have adverse effects on matters of internal and external security” and Germany’s liberal democratic order, BAMF added.
Hannah Voẞ, head of the legal team at German pro-transparency NGO FragDenStaat, told Syria Direct that some of the arguments presented by BAMF in its refusal were “absurd.”
“I have seen many [asylum procedures] in court hearings. As an asylum seeker, you also have to be convincing when telling your story, and [the courts] check it,” Voẞ explained. “It’s pretty ridiculous to say that just if you read something in there, then you will make up a story [with this information].”
The German lawyer added: “The argument is also flawed. Once you’re in the asylum procedure, you have the right to access the [BAMF report] anyway, so you could still change your story accordingly. The argument really just doesn’t make any sense.”
To understand how the undisclosed report was impacting Syrian asylum seekers, Syria Direct reviewed asylum court decisions from Germany’s four most populous states from the past year. Between April 2025 and January 2026, the then-unpublished Syria COI report was used in 12 court decisions to deny asylum applications or justify deportation orders against Syrians in Germany.
In one case from September 2025, a court in Cologne confirmed a deportation order issued by BAMF against a 26-year old Arab man from Hasakah province, in northeastern Syria.
The young man stated he feared retribution by forces of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), which then fully controlled the province, after evading mandatory conscription there.
In its decision, the court relied extensively on BAMF’s then-unpublished report, citing it 11 times. “Arabs who refuse self-defense service,” a transcript of the decision read, “are treated more leniently than Kurds.”
Even though “Arabs refusing self-defense service are perceived as ‘cowards or opponents of DAANES’ or ‘opponents of Kurdish hegemony’,” the court said, “there is no indication that individuals who have evaded self-defense are presumed to hold oppositional positions by the authorities or DAANES military structures.” Therefore, it found the 26-year old’s fear of persecution was unjustified.
“Only one source indicated that deaths had occurred in detention as a result of refusing service. However, this isolated report could not be corroborated by any further evidence,” the court stated, referencing BAMF’s report.
This assessment seems to have been both inadequate and outdated.
The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the diverse but Kurdish-led military wing of AANES, has long been accused of compulsory military recruitment and human rights abuses, including torture, in several of its prisons. Reports emerging after the withdrawal of the SDF from parts of Syria’s northeast earlier this year appear to confirm these allegations.
In January 2026, the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) reported it had documented the SDF’s involvement in more than 3,700 cases of enforced disappearance since 2012. Some 122 people had been killed due to torture and mistreatment within SDF detention centers over the same time period.
Earlier this month, the SNHR also confirmed the death of a Syrian national who had been in SDF custody since October 2025. Alaa al-Amin had Swedish citizenship and returned to his hometown of Qamishli to marry and resettle a month before his arrest. According to SNHR, he had been held for months without being formally charged and his body showed clear signs of torture when it was returned to his family.
When Syria Direct approached BAMF on March 23 to inquire about the seemingly outdated information in its then-unreleased report, a spokesperson for the agency informed us that the report had just been made public.
The spokesperson denied our research had any impact on the decision to publish the report. “The classification of the report [as confidential] was removed because the legal requirements were no longer met at that time,” the spokesperson stated.
A second BAMF report, drafted in November 2025 and quietly published in February 2026, reiterated the same inaccurate claims regarding the SDF’s treatment of its prisoners.
Writing of the punishment of individuals who evade conscription in the northeast, the November report stated: “Credible information indicates that detention does not usually occur. There are no reports of mistreatment during detention.”
Worryingly, the newer report also removed a one-page section dedicated to the treatment of LGBTQ people in the country.
Responding to the inaccuracies and amendments, a BAMF spokesperson told us that each report “reflects the evolving situation in Syria at the time of their preparation.”
According to Voẞ, FragDenStaat’s legal expert, this is not the first time that German authorities could be misrepresenting the situation on the ground to facilitate the removal of asylum seekers.
In July 2021, in the lead-up to the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, Germany’s Foreign Office used an outdated confidential report to justify its decision to continue deportations to the country, despite a request from the Afghan government at the time to suspend them.
German daily Die Tageszeitung, which obtained a copy of the Afghanistan report, found that the Foreign Office made false claims which downplayed the security situation in the country at the time.
An attempt to obfuscate this type of information also happened last year in the Netherlands. The government at the time, having promised the country’s “toughest ever” policy on immigration, decided to keep its COI reports confidential, claiming they could be abused by asylum seekers and their lawyers.
The policy was struck down by the courts, which ordered the government to release its report on Syria last June. The Dutch government ultimately complied.
Although the Dutch report did not draw final conclusions on whether Syria could be designated safe or not, it acknowledged that the security situation in the country was “unstable,” “fragile,” “volatile” and “highly fragmented.”
Christian van Dijk, a Dutch lawyer involved in the case, called the government’s accusation of potential abuse of the report—logic similar to that used by Germany’s BAMF when refusing to provide Syria Direct with access to its own report—“a questionable argument.”
“Everyone, including the Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND) and lawyers, uses the document to their advantage. The decision of the IND has to be diligent and substantiated sufficiently with documentation,” he told Syria Direct.
“The report must be made public so it can be scrutinized. It frequently occurs that the IND makes assertions with reference to the report, but when I verify them, they turn out to be completely incorrect or misinterpreted. That is why transparency is of great importance,” van Dijk added.
Hannah Voẞ, the lawyer from FragDenStaat, agreed. “If all the reports were publicly available, it would be good for the quality of the reports, because more people could see them, and maybe there would be some sort of public debate on what’s in them,” Voẞ told Syria Direct.
“More transparency of information is always better for the quality of what’s in these reports, in the end,” she concluded.
This publication was made possible with the support of the Dutch Fund for Special Journalistic Projects (Fonds Bijzondere Journalistieke Projecten).
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