BERLIN, Aug. 14 (Xinhua) -- German legal system is struggling under a wave of asylum cases and deportation appeals, Robert Seegmuelller, director of the Federal Association of German Administrative Judges, warned on Monday.
"One can rightfully say: The situation is dramatic ... is creaking," Seegmueller said in a statement.
More than a million refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan have arrived in Germany since 2015. The circumstance has placed unusually heavy pressure on German courts which are now tasked with ruling on asylum and deportation cases.
According to the association, the annual figure of the related cases will double for the second year in a row in 2017 and rise to a total of 200,000.
Seegmueller identified two root causes responsible for the current situation. Firstly, more refugees have begun launching appeals against the Federal Office for Migration and Refugee's rejection notice for their asylum applications.
Secondly, judicial authorities were still severely short of staff although the number of judges has risen significantly in the past 18 months to a total of 2,000.
The courts could not find enough suitable applicants, Seegmueller complained, adding "the situation is just very, very burdensome."
Seegmueller further noted that some courts were lack of facilities as well as "non-judicial staff", adding the only viable solution now was to recruit as many people as possible, as well as facilities and financial resources.
In the long term, however, he said, legislative changes would also be necessary to alleviate the pressure of refugees on the German judiciary.
As German law currently often prevented swift court proceedings, "similarly-structured legal and factual questions" were urged to be processed more rapidly, for example, by the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig.
At the moment, 15 higher administrative courts and 51 administrative courts work in parallel on similar cases, creating an unnecessarily inflated workload, said Seegmueller, who is also an acting judge at the Federal Administrative Court.
