Austria deports children to Armenia, Georgia by night, triggering outrage and protests

Over the last few days, Austria’s immigration authorities have taken children from their homes and schools in Vienna and Lower Austria and deported them to Georgia and Armenia, METROPOLE reports.

Most of those children are known to have spent the majority of their lives in Austria or were born here.

In the dead of the night, in the middle of a raging global pandemic, Austria’s Interior Ministry chartered a plane to deport children back to the Eastern Caucasus. Among those to be deported are 12-years-old Tina and her sister 5-years-old Lea, who were both born in Austria.

The children’s mother, originally from Georgia, came for the first time to Austria in 2006 where she applied for asylum. She had to leave Austria and re-entered two years later. All levels of review rejected her various asylum applications. The family has so far refused to leave the country, informed sources reported to the Ö1-Mittagsjournal that six previous deportation attempts by the authorities had been unsuccessful.

While the legal situation seems clear at first, experts say the decision does not reflect the interests of children, who have spent practically all their live in Austria. A “humanitarian right to stay” (humanitäres Bleiberecht) is always an option in these cases, but was denied by the Austrian Interior Ministry.

Asylum lawyer Wilfried Embacher sees many such cases: “The situation of the children, although provided for by law, is not sufficiently taken into account,” he said to the ORF, “and the children currently follow the legal fate of their parents, although priority should be given to the best interests of the child.”

Neither Tina and Lea has ever gone to school in Georgia, and can neither read nor write the language. “This is a completely unimaginable interference with [Tina’s] interests and actually a destruction of her future,” Embacher said.

The case of the Georgian family in Austria became widely known through fellow students and teachers in Vienna who brought it to public attention. Among those was also Florian Klenk, editor-in-chief of the Vienna weekly Falter.

“We are stunned, sad, angry and indignant,” one of Tina’s teachers told the Austrian daily Heute, summing up the mood at the school. Tina attends the third grade of the Stubenbastei Gymnasium in Vienna’s 1st district. “She is very well integrated and speaks fluent German,” the teacher said.

On Wednesday afternoon, classmates demonstrated in front of the deportation center. The class’s student representative, Johann Philipp, told Ö1: “For Tina, a world is collapsing, as it is for her classmates. Nobody understands that this is an absolutely integrated family.”