If you've been left waiting months, or even years, to hear a decision on your application to naturalise as German you may be wondering what you can do to speed things up. We asked experts to lay out some options.
Germany's immigration authorities are notoriously slow to process naturalisation applications.
As The Local recently reported, applicants hoping to naturalise as German can expect to wait anywhere from two years to 50 months before hearing back from the authorities in cities like Dresden or Leipzig.
And it's not only cities in the east that struggle to keep up with incoming applications, wait times of well over a year or more are also common in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich, Cologne, Dortmund – almost every major German city.
While waiting to hear back from the Ausländerbehörde you may feel like there's nothing you can do, but actually there are ways to try and speed up the process. Here's what you should know about how you can ensure your application for German citizenship is processed as quickly as possible.
Prepare a neat and organised application
If you have not already submitted your citizenship application, it's worth taking the time to making sure its complete and as well organised as possible before you turn it in.
Andreas Moser, a Chemnitz-based immigration and family lawyer, previously told The Local that simple things like making sure your documents are neatly scanned and legible can seriously speed up how fast your application is processed.
Immigration authorities in Germany say that they process applications in the order they are received, but presenting all of your documents in a way that makes them easy to find and to read ensures that your case moves forward smoothly.
Most important is to ensure you are not missing any of the required documents. Applying early, but with missing information, is a good way to have your case held up for a long time, as the immigration office will then need to contact you to collect more documents before moving forward.
After that making an effort to make everything well-organised, such as by listing your attached files in a numbered index, can really make a difference.
Moser cited the example of an immigration officer with several applications on their desk who is going into the last hour of their work day: "They’re going to take an easy case. So if there’s a nice cover letter and everything is there and neatly presented – they’ll pick that file."
EXPLAINED: How to get a speedy response on your German citizenship application
Putting pressure on the authorities
In many immigration offices in Germany, however, it's very likely that you could be left waiting for a decision on your citizenship application for an unreasonable amount of time regardless of how well put together your documents were.
In this case you can consider bringing a lawsuit for a 'failure to act'.
A failure to act lawsuit, called an Untätigkeitsklage in German, is a legal complaint that can be brought against administrative authorities in Germany if they fail to meet an obligation within a reasonable amount of time. Generally you can file one if an administrative authority has not responded to you within at least three months.
Christin Schneider, a spokesperson for Migrando, a law firm specialising in immigration law that helps clients with naturalisation cases, told The Local that when dealing with particularly slow immigration offices, her firm often ends up advising their clients to bring failure to act lawsuits.
"In our view, an action for failure to act under law is not only a sensible but an indispensable legal remedy in many cases. It is the only instrument legally available to those affected to force a response from the authority after years of waiting," Schneider wrote in an email.
Schneider added that in Leipzig, court records revealed that the agency was still processing applications from early 2023, and was unable to say reliably when later applications would be processed.
READ ALSO: Where in Germany wait times for citizenship are the longest
That's not to say that simply filing a lawsuit will immediately slash your wait time. Schneider cited cases in Berlin where administrative judges had to repeatedly urge the authorities to act, and received little or no response.
"And yet we consider the action for failure to act indispensable: not only as an individual legal remedy for specific cases, but also as a necessary signal to authorities and policymakers," Schneider said.
"We need more lawsuits, not fewer -- so that the reality within naturalisation authorities is finally heard at the political level and structural changes are initiated."
It's a common practice to send a letter to the authorities threatening to bring an Untätigkeitsklage before actually taking legal action. Various legal experts have previously told The Local that in some cases, merely receiving this threat is enough to pressure them to more quickly decide on an application.
You don't necessarily need to hire a lawyer to draft a letter threatening to bring a failure to act lawsuit, but it may be helpful to do so.
READ ALSO: Does hiring a lawyer speed up your German citizenship application?
Are there risks with taking legal action?
It may seem counter-intuitive to threaten those that have authority over your citizenship application with legal action, but in the wild world of German bureaucracy this is often par for the course.
If you are clearly entitled to German citizenship, i.e. you meet all the requirements and your application demonstrates with clearly with good documentation, then bringing a lawsuit is basically just putting pressure on the Ausländerbehörde to approve your application and move on.
If there are any holes in your application, however, bringing a lawsuit may only speed up your rejection.
READ ALSO: How many German citizenship applications are rejected?
