Court dismisses AfD lawsuit against Merkel's immigration policy

The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany has dismissed several complaints from the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party against the government's immigration policy, the court announced on Tuesday.

In April, the AfD's parliamentary group had filed a lawsuit against the government's decision in 2015 to admit refugees at the German border. Since 2015, hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees had come to Germany via the so-called Balkan route in order to seek asylum. "We can do it," German Chancellor Angela Merkel famously responded to the refugee crisis at the time.

The verdict announced by the judges of the German constitutional court states that the AfD, which first entered parliament in 2017, had not sufficiently demonstrated that any rights had been violated by the decisions to offer shelter to refugees in 2015.

According to the court, the lawsuits filed by the AfD aimed "to prevent certain actions by the German government," and therefore the applications were inadmissible through this legal procedure.