BERLIN, June 14 (Xinhua) -- At the end of the bi-annual conference of German state interior ministers on Friday, participants were still divided over the question whether asylum seekers should be deported to Afghanistan.
Afghanistan would not be a country in which at the present time unblemished people can be deported with a "clear conscience", said Boris Pistorius (SPD), interior minister of the federal state of Lower Saxony.
Thomsas Strobl of the conservative CDU countered the concerns and referred to Germany's Foreign Ministry which came to the conclusion that it was is possible to generally deport people to Afghanistan, not only criminals, dangerous persons and persistent identity deniers.
Twice a year, the interior ministers of all of Germany's 16 federal states hold a joint conference to pass resolutions on a wide range of nationwide relevant topics such as security, migration and criminal prosecution.
During the conference that ended on Friday, the German state interior ministers made a decision on the extensions of a deportation stop of asylum seekers from Germany to Syria until the end of 2019.
The interior ministers also announced at the conference that they would step up their efforts against criminal clans and larger families in Germany, including by withdrawing German citizenship.
"In particular, I promise, in the event of proven involvement in clan crime, to quickly realize the withdrawal of German citizenship, as desired by the federal states, in the presence of a second citizenship," said German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer.
The German police union (GdP) welcomed the initiative to increase the pressure on criminal clans in Germany.
"The business models of the criminal clans were able to develop more or less undisturbed over a long period of time. Fast and above all lasting successes are not to be expected in the short term," warned Oliver Malchow, head of the GdP, on Friday.
