304,900 arrivals between January and November compared with 890,000 in 2015. The authorities improved their capacity to process asylum applications throughout the year. Between January and November, approximately 702,490 individuals, many of whom had arrived in Germany the previous year, claimed asylum. The authorities made a decision in about 615,520 cases. The rate at which Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans received full refugee status decreased compared with the previous year; more individuals were granted subsidiary protection and fewer received full refugee status. The former status granted fewer rights, including with respect to family reunification. Between January and November, 59% of Syrian applicants obtained full refugee status compared with 99.6% in the same period of 2015. In March, new amendments to asylum laws entered into force. The right to family reunification for individuals with subsidiary protection status was suspended until March 2018. A new fast-track procedure for assessing asylum applications from a variety of categories of applicants, including asylumseekers from countries deemed to be “safe”, was introduced without providing for sufficient guarantees to ensure access to a fair asylum procedure. At the end of the year, a law defining Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia as “safe” countries of origin was pending before the Federal Council. The new fasttrack procedure had not been implemented by the end of the year. In May, Parliament passed the first ever law on integration for refugees and asylumseekers. The law aimed at creating employment and educational opportunities for refugees and imposed on them the obligation to follow integration courses. It also allowed authorities of the federal states to impose restrictions on where refugees could reside, tightened conditions for issuing residence permits and introduced new benefit cuts for those not complying with the new rules. Until 19 December, Germany relocated 640 refugees from Greece and 455 from Amnesty International Report 2016/17 Italy. As part of the EU-Turkey Deal, Germany accepted the transfer of 1,060 Syrian refugees from Turkey. Despite the worsening security situation in Afghanistan, authorities forcibly returned more than 60 Afghan nationals whose asylum applications had been rejected. In 2015, fewer than 10 unsuccessful Afghan asylum-seekers were forcibly returned. TORTURE AND OTHER ILL-TREATMENT The authorities continued to fail to effectively investigate allegations of ill-treatment by the police and did not establish any independent complaints mechanism to investigate those allegations. At the end of the year, the governments of North-Rheine Westphalia and Sachsen Anhalt were planning to introduce the obligation for police officers to wear identity badges while on duty. The Joint Commission of the National Agency for the Prevention of Torture – Germany’s preventive mechanism under the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention against Torture – remained understaffed and underfinanced. In April, the Hannover Prosecution Office closed the investigation into allegations of illtreatment by a federal police officer against two Afghan and Moroccan refugees in the holding cells of the federal police at Hannover’s main train station in 2014. In September, the Celle Upper Regional Court rejected the request introduced by one of the victims to reopen the investigation. DISCRIMINATION The second Committee of Inquiry, established by Parliament in October 2015, pursued its investigation into some of the authorities’ failures to investigate the racist and xenophobic crimes perpetrated against members of ethnic minorities by the far-right group National Socialist Underground between 2000 and 2007. No official inquiry was launched into the potential role of institutional racism behind those failures, despite the 2015 recommendations of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial 167