Bureaucracy and Human Rights - made by humans for humans

In my student job at the KVR in the foreigners office, where I am supposed to help international students and scientists with bureaucracy matters, I am constantly confronted with the interaction of bureaucracy and human claims. 
Students have to go the KVR to apply for a residence title or extend it, if they want to change their subject or university, when they have finished their studies and want to apply for a job searching visa etc. In this job my task is to go through the queue (that lines up to get a waiting number that allows them to see one of the officers) and check whether they have brought all needed documents with them, to answer some questions (if I can, because I haven’t really been taught all this visa background knowledge) and (very importantly) to tell them when they are in the wrong queue. International students that come to the KVR are often nervous because they are worried that they might not get an extension of their residence title, a permit to work etc.   

During my time at the KVR I have been able to get an insight into bureaucratic practices and how German administrations deal with internationals. Most of the time it is really exhausting and in the beginning I was a bit horrified about the terrible queuing situations there, as there are far too less officers. The asylum department had to be moved to another building, as the KVR is so overcrowded that there wasn’t enough space. Besides that, I also experienced a change about myself. As in this job I have to speak to a lot of different people, switching between English, German (and sign language) from 8 in the morning until 6 in the evening, I noticed that in the beginning of the day I was still very fresh, friendly and willing to pay attention to every single problem. In the afternoon I noticed that I started to get impatient and annoyed at people and closed myself up more to their problems.In the beginning of my job I tried to solve every individual problem, asking the officers every single detail. But this started to become so exhausting and as a consequence I was not able to speak to everyone in the queue, but in my job it is expected of me to speak to everyone and check whether they have brought all their documents before they reach the service point. So I see myself in a conflict situation as I want to be friendly and show them that I am there for them but when I am too open and caring, people feel that they can take me up with every single problem. I once had a situation when after I have finished my work and just wanted to go home, people started following me to the underground and kept asking me questions. At that point I decided, that I had to be more closed up and just consequently have to say „no“ sometimes but this also makes me feel bad. 

What about people that have to work there everyday? They have to take decisions about other people’s lifes everyday. Of course they need to close themselves up and this is why they seem so cold and distant sometimes. To take this a bit further: what about a judge that has to take a decision about an asylum claim and has heard 10 different stories during his day and then he or she is tired and exhausted and just wants to go home? So then as the judge is also just a human, it might come to the point that he just wants to get over with this decision very quickly and some important facts might be left out. This might lead to the fact that for example people are treated differently in the morning than in the afternoon or the other way round.

The rules and orders of this bureaucratic system are made from above by the government. So both, the officers and the students, could be seen as „victims of bureaucracy“. Once there was a situation, when a girl, that had queued for hours in the wrong line and then had to queue again at another place, exclaimed under tears, that she felt violated in her human rights. Of course it wasn’t the officer’s fault as she was just doing her job, but I can really understand the feeling that being stuck in a bureaucratic system (where nobody seems to be responsible for you) makes you feel like being in a different- kafkaesque- dimension because you are totally dependent on that system and you can’t take matters into your own hands. And yet, we somehow need a bureaucratic apparatus to structure people’s lifes and get things sorted, otherwise it would get out of control. So how can human rights and a bureaucratic system interact with each other? Can they? 

However, from my experience, officers at the KVR are most of the time trying their best to help people, although, especially in the foreigner’s office, there are sometimes some cultural or language barriers that make things complicated. This is were the anthropologist can come into play…