Interior Minister Horst Seehofer has ruled out the notion that Germany could start deporting criminal refugees to Syria. The idea had been proposed within the conservative CDU party, The Local reported.

“At the moment there can’t be any deportations to any region in Syria, that is also the case for criminals,” Seehofer told Spiegel on Friday.

Several of Seehofer's’ colleagues in the CDU party have called in recent weeks for Syrian refugees who break the law is a serious manner to be deported back to their home country.

In the wake of the gang rape of an 18-year-old woman in Freiburg earlier in November, the influential interior minister of Baden-Württemberg, Thomas Strobl, called for his colleagues to consider lifting the ban on deportations to the war-torn country. Several of the suspects in the case were Syrian refugees.

State interior ministers will meet Seehofer in Magdeburg at the annual interior minister conference next Wednesday and one topic of discussion will be the extension of the ban on deportations to Syria.

The idea of lifting the ban has met with fierce resistance from the Social Democrats and opposition parties.