German Consulate in Karachi suspends operation
The German Consulate in Karachi has suspends operation. In a notice shared on social media the mission stated that visa and attestation services in Karachi are suspended until further notice.
Who is impacted?
This has impacted all Pakistanis living in Sindh and Baluchistan provinces applying for Germany. These include short term visa applicants such as tourists, family visitors, students, and long term visa applicants like settlement applications, job seekers, national visa seekers.
German Visa appointments
All visa appointments are also cancelled until further notice. Interviews for July 8, 2024 and July 9, 2024 have been rescheduled. Applicants are being advised of new date by email used during appointment booking procedure. No new applications will be accepted until further notice.
Visa Granted?
Passports for those visa applicants whose delivery date was July 8, 2024 and beyond can still be collected from the Consulate. There is no guarantee if the visa has been granted or not. All visa applications are dealt on merit and on individual basis.
Investigation against visa issuance practices?
It is reported that officials in German missions deliberately accepted forged passports and/or insufficient documents when issuing visas. What was originally treated as a handful of cases could now actually be in the thousands.
According to reports confirmed by the Ministry, which is run by Green politician Annalena Baerbock, the German judiciary is now investigating civil servants for allegedly deliberately accepting forged and incomplete visa documents. Reportedly, German staff at consulates and embassies in countries including Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan were advised to accept fake passports, thereby enabling migrants to legally travel to Germany, despite violating existing rules that require proper documentation.
Although the investigation into forged visa documents is ongoing, the fact that the Foreign Ministry is yet to issue a denial — not to mention Baerbock’s own silence on the matter — is a strong indicator that the authorities are acting on more than a hunch. There have been suggestions in the past that the ministry was bending existing rules to fly in people from Afghanistan, and this is the most substantial charge yet. The accusation amounts to one of Germany’s most important federal ministries engaging in a form of human trafficking: enabling migrants to enter the country under false pretences or with forged documents is a crime prosecutable under existing law.
Migration is becoming an increasingly salient issue, particularly after a 20-year-old German was brutally beaten to death this week by, police claim, a Syrian migrant who entered the country in 2018.