Dresden (dpa/sn) – The petitions for the right to stay of the Vietnamese Pham Phi Son and his family will not be handed over to the state parliament this Friday as planned. As Parliament announced on Tuesday, the petitioner canceled the appointment. According to the refugee council, another option is currently being examined by the family’s legal representative in order to organize the family’s stay as quickly as possible. Pham Phi Son has been living in Saxony for 35 years. Now he, his wife and his child are threatened with deportation. The online petition asking for her whereabouts had been signed by 82,673 people as of Tuesday morning.
“We are absolutely overwhelmed by the great response to the petition and on behalf of the family we would like to thank everyone who has supported us so far. Although the case is exemplary for many people who have built up an existence here over the years, we have not yet had a comparable media and political echo,” said Dave Schmidtke, spokesman for the Saxon Refugee Council, the German Press Agency in Dresden. This great support from civil society proves that the family in question has arrived and deserves the right to stay here.
According to the information, Pham Phi Son came to the GDR in 1987 as a contract worker. In the meantime, however, he had been back in Vietnam for more than half a year, thereby violating deadlines in Germany. The case had already dealt with courts, as well as the country’s hardship commission – without success.
