Pastor Tobias Heyden says he will never forget the sight of police vehicles blocking his rectory on the evening of May 12, 2024. Around ten armed police officers surrounded his parish hall in Bienenbüttel, a tranquil community of 7,000 in Lower Saxony. Police arrested a family from Russia who was hiding there — a couple with an adult son and a 16-year-old daughter — and flew them from the Cologne/Bonn airport to Barcelona that same night.

That was the first time in decades that the state of Lower Saxony deployed the police to end a church asylum. "I am in a state of shock," Heyden told DW.

The asylum-seekers in this case were a Russian family who had been granted a Schengen tourist visa by Spain. They were visiting relatives in Germany when a Russian conscription order for the father and son arrived. The family did not want the men to participate in Russia's war against Ukraine, so they applied for asylum in Germany. But according to European law, Spain, not Germany, was responsible for the family, as it........

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