Uncertain
Future: Weaknesses Emerge in EU-Turkey Refugee Deal
By Giorgos
Christides, Katrin Kuntz and Maximilian Popp
April 08, 2016 –
06:38 PM
The EU is praising
the first deportations this week from Greece to Turkey as a
breakthrough for the recent refugee agreement with Ankara. But it was
little more than a show. Many believe the deal will fail to survive
the expected legal challenges.
Sham Mohammed has
just spent his fourth consecutive night between two olive trees in a
recess of stone and grass near the Moria deportation camp on the
island of Lesbos in another attempt to defy the will of the European
Union. He wears a fleece pullover and the yellow safety vest of a
volunteer. At night, he wraps his feet with a scarf. If it gets too
cold, he does jumping jacks to get his blood circulating again.
Mohammed is a
diminutive 21-year-old art student from Pakistan. He believes there's
only one way left to prevent getting deported. "I have to hide
from the police," he says. "Because they might also deport
me without even reviewing an asylum application." Dozens of
people like Mohammed are currently hiding in the groves around Moria.
When the Greek
authorities announced last week that they were unable to carry out
additional mass deportations because some migrants had suddenly
disappeared, they were referring to people like Mohammed. Just as
quickly as the deportations had begun, they came to a halt.
In the dawn hours on
Monday, the EU began implementing the refugee deal it recently
reached with Turkey. At least that's the way things looked. That day,
202 migrants were deported from Lesbos and Chios to Dikili in Turkey.
The action was intended to show that the major exchange of refugees
had begun. The same day, Syrian refugees arrived in Germany legally
on flights from Turkey. By the middle of the week, no more refugees
were arriving on the Greek islands. The message appeared to be
getting across. So was the deal working? The short answer is: No.
"Perhaps we
should wait and see a bit longer," Dimitris Vitsas, the deputy
Greek defense minister responsible for addressing the refugee crisis,
says. He says the weather may have played a part and that he doesn't
want to draw premature conclusions. "But the numbers do show
that something is working."
But what? Is it the
deal with Turkey or the PR machinery that has accompanied it? The
deportations that took place on Monday aren't very telling in terms
of whether the mechanism will ultimately work or not. The EU had set
April 4 as the day of implementation because it wanted to finally
show that it could produce results. The overly hasty operation had
one aim: that of sending a strong message.
All Show?
What went unnoticed
by most, though, is that the people sent back to Turkey from Lesbos
and Chios on Monday were exclusively migrants who had wanted to
continue their journey to Northern Europe and had not submitted
applications for asylum in Greece. But Greece had already had the
ability to deport these "illegal" migrants to Turkey since
2002 within the scope of a so-called readmission agreement that both
countries had agreed to. So the new deal hadn't even been necessary
for the deportations to happen.
"Monday was an
expensive, but meaningless show," says Angeliki Dimitriadi, a
visiting researcher at the European Council on Foreign Relations in
Berlin. "Now the truly delicate work begins."
Of the more than
3,000 migrants who are still on Lesbos, almost all have since
submitted asylum applications. They hope that doing so will enable
them to prevent being deported. The refugees are assuming that it
will take weeks or months to process their applications. With the
submission of the applications, the Greek government no longer has
the right to automatically deport them; the country is legally
obligated to review every application. Refugees who have applied can
only be deported once asylum status has been rejected. The worry now
is that thousands of people may be stuck on the island for months to
come without any certainty.
Things will get more
difficult when Greece soon begins rejecting Syrian refugees as
planned and sending them back to Turkey. At that point, a complicated
legal dispute is expected to ensue. First, it remains questionable
whether Greece will be capable of carrying out the asylum procedures
within only a matter of days as planned. The country lacks both money
and the necessary personnel. The Greek asylum agency currently has
only 295 employees at its disposal across the entire country. It
often takes months if not years before decisions are made.
A Massive Logistical
Challenge
The European
Commission has announced it will send 2,300 experts to provide
support, including police, asylum case officers, judges and
interpreters. But few believe that Europe will succeed in changing
the Greek asylum system overnight. So far, the EU hasn't even
succeeded in sending enough officials. More than anything, the
EU-Turkey deal represents a massive logistical challenge.
The situation was so
chaotic the night before the first deportations took place that a
senior official at one of the responsible EU agencies had to spend
the night in a car because all the hotel rooms had been booked up.
There were no lack of reports about the problems, either. Britain's
The Guardian reported on Tuesday that 13 Afghan and Congolese
refugees had been deported after police "forgot" to process
their asylum claims, according to the director of UNHCR's Europe
bureau. Athens has denied the charge.
Sitting in the lobby
of a hotel in Athens is Heiko Werner, 44, team leader for Germany's
Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, a man who has little
patience for the accusations of chaos. Werner has spent the past
decade working in crisis regions, and he has seen a thing or two in
his life: refugee camps in Sudan, malnourished children. He's a man
capable of assessing a mission, and one who knows how quickly rumors
can travel in refugee camps. But he also knows how to transform a
blueprint into a concrete asylum system. "I am confident that
things will work in Greece," he says. Werner is also fond of
peppering his explanations with terms straight out of the consultancy
firm cookbook. He says Monday's operation, at least in principle,
were symbolic, aimed at testing the new system.
He speaks of a "soft
start." The next step, he says, is to fill a new structure with
the necessary staff and to determine whether it is working and to
then "go live" with it. The workers who participate in the
test would remain and would be complemented by additional trained
personnel.
"We have many
people who must be processed," says Werner. "Our teams have
to be able to achieve a high level of productivity very quickly."
He says the pilot process should then be populated with more
employees who would be working in the service of the Greek officials.
He says he's certain the deal will work.
"For us, the
burning question is what will happen when word gets around about the
repatriations in the camps in Turkey," says Werner. He compares
it with the decision to declare Albania and Kosovo to be safe
countries of origin. Once that happened, the number of asylum-seekers
from those countries dropped dramatically.
Is Turkey Really a
Safe Country of Origin?
But even if the EU
does succeed in getting the upper hand on the logistical aspects, the
deal could soon face legal challenges. In order to reduce refugee
numbers on the long term, sending only Pakistanis and Moroccans back
to Turkey won't be enough. The authorities would also have to begin
deporting significant numbers of Syrians, who had a nearly 100
percent rate of being granted asylum protection in Europe last year.
The deal is an
indication that the EU views Turkey as a safe country of origin. That
means that applications of refugees who travel to Greece via Turkey
may be rejected. But it is questionable whether this line of
argumentation will stand in court. Experts argue that Turkey fails to
meet a series of minimum standards required by European asylum law.
When it signed the Geneva Convention on Refugees, Ankara retained a
geographic limitation stipulating that only those fleeing as a
consequence of "events occurring in Europe" must be given
refugee status. The government has created exceptions for Syrians,
but all others are forced to get by without any state aid.
"The deal will
not be allowed to stand by the European Court of Justice,"
predicts Luise Amtsberg, the refugee policy spokesperson for the
Green Party group in the Bundestag, Germany's federal parliament. She
visited Lesbos this week. Even members of the Greek government view
the deal skeptically. "If we find that the criteria we have set
for Turkey for securing refugee rights are not being fulfilled, then
we won't be able to send any more people back," Greek Interior
Minister Panagiotis Kouroumblis told SPIEGEL.
Human rights
organizations like Germany's Pro Asyl have already announced their
intention to provide support to refugees seeking to sue in European
courts. If judges were to then suspend deportations, the deterrent
effect would immediately fall flat and the deal would be over.
Sham Mohammed, the
Pakistani, explains that his family back in Pakistan is being
persecuted by a criminal gang. He says they have shot his father in
the leg and injured his uncle. He, too, believes he is in danger. He
claims that while making his journey to Lesbos, he was kidnapped and
tortured in Iran. He even shows what he says are traces of that
torture on his elbow.
In order to review
Mohammed's asylum application, he would have to be posed a multitude
of detailed questions. "An asylum official with a medium level
of experience could spend an entire day with an interview like that,"
says American attorney Kavita Kapur, 30, who has worked in the past
for government agencies as well as for the UN Refugee Agency (UNFCR).
Kapur is here out of concern for the refugees' rights.
She is one of the
few independent monitors who is allowed to move freely inside Camp
Moria. She also speaks Urdu, the lingua franca of Pakistan. She says
that the police officers who are the only ones authorized to take the
migrants to the asylum registration centers cannot even understand
the men. She claims that other migrants stood outside the office for
days and never managed to make it inside during opening hours.
"I think the
government is doing its best, but Greece has always had a very weak
asylum system," Kapur says. "Before an orderly system has
been set up, no one should be deported."
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário