30,000 sign petition calling for return of Yezidi family to Germany

More than 30,000 people in Germany have signed a petition calling for the return of a Yezidi family who were deported just before a court ruling allowing them to stay in the country.

"Bring our classmate back from Iraq," reads the petition on the Change.org platform.

The pupil and his family were deported "for no apparent reason" and had "always tried to integrate," the petition said.

The boy's uncle appealed to the public in an Instagam video posted on Thursday, arguing that "as a Yezidi family, they continue to face the threat of ISIS [Islamic State] terrorism in Iraq."

Yezidis are politically persecuted and oppressed in Iraq, he said, calling on people to sign the petition.

The family of six had been living in the town of Lychen, some 80 kilometres north of Berlin, since 2022.

Their application for asylum was rejected, and then in 2023 they took legal action against their pending deportation.

After this challenge was rejected by a Potsdam court, they were set for deportation but lodged an emergency appeal which was successful.

By the time the emergency ruling came in however, the family had already been deported.

The deportation was met with widespread criticism from opposition parties and migrant rights groups.

In 2023, the German parliament recognized crimes committed by Islamic State against the Yezidis in 2014 as genocide.

An urgent application for the family's return from Iraq is pending.

The interior minister in the state of Brandenburg, René Wilke, had said that he wanted to bring the family back quickly in coordination with the federal government if the court's latest ruling stands. However, the state Interior Ministry said it currently sees no possibility of bringing them back.