Berlin schools 'racially segregating' children

Several primary and secondary schools in Berlin are segregating migrant children into classes with "vastly inferior education," to attract "ethnic Germans," an NGO has told a United Nations Human Rights session in Geneva.

The report, drawn up by the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) noted that children of immigrants are being segregated from native-born German pupils on the putative grounds that their German language skills are inadequate for regular classes.

“In fact, although they speak German as a second language (in most cases), their language skills generally are adequate for regular classes, but serve as a proxy for discrimination on the basis of ethnicity or other suspect criteria,” the OSJI reported.

“The discriminatory practices stigmatise migrant students, undermine their potential to integrate and participate fully in German society, and violate Germany’s obligations to prohibit discrimination,” the report concluded.

Serdar Yazar, of the Berlin Brandenburg Turkish association (TBB), which helped gather data and parents' testimonies for the report, was unsurprised by its conclusions, but said that active segregation was a new development.

"This is a new tendency," he told The Local. "We've had a lot of negative references for children of immigrant background who want to go to other schools, but in the last two or three years we've had more and more cases of separated classes."

He cites one particularly well-known case of a primary school in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. Read more..