The German interior ministry on Sunday (February 26) said law-enforcement officials in the country registered a total of 3,533 registered attacks on refugees and asylum-seekers in 2016, which resulted in injury to 560 people, including 43 children.
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The ministry also reported that there had been around 217 attacks against non-profit organisations that support refugees and volunteers from those organisations, according to Efe News reports.
The report was drafted in response to a request made by the parliamentary group of the Opposition party, Die Linke. It also stated that at least 2,545 of the 3,533 instances of attacks of hate crimes against refugees occurred outside official reception centres, the IANS reported. The centres run by government saw 998 attacks in 2016, which is a slightly lower record than in 2015 when 1,031 attacks were registered.
"Must there be deaths before right-wing violence is considered a central security problem and put on the interior policy agenda," Die Linke's parliamentary spokesperson Ulla Jelpke asked in an interview.
Jelpke said the government is encouraging fear-mongering against the refugees by passing stricter asylum and immigration laws that suggest that they pose a security threat in the country.
The interior ministry also provided data stating that the country had taken in 280,000 asylum-seekers in 2016, which is a 68 per cent decrease in comparison to the 890,000 refugees which arrived in Germany in 2015 to seek asylum.
Reports state that the main reason behind this dramatic drop in the asylum requests are the closure of the so-called Balkan route and the signing of a refugee-repatriation deal between the European Union and Turkey. Turkey, in March last year, had agreed to take in the extra flow of refugees in return for easy EU visas for Turks. Around 14,500 asylum-seeker reportedly entered Germany this January.
