OPINION
How
to make the EU-Turkey deal work
The
EU should take its critics seriously. But the current deal is the
best approach we have.
By GUNTRAM WOLFF
4/10/16, 5:50 AM CET
Critics have called
the EU-Turkey deal on refugees immoral and raised questions about
potential breaches of international law, but — like it or not —
the deal is an improvement. It brought the continent back from the
brink, staving off the collapse of the Schengen zone and a
humanitarian disaster in Greece. Europe must now focus on the deal’s
implementation, offer technical assistance and support political
stability in Greece, and find ways to make the resettlement program
work.
By negotiating with
Turkey the EU wanted to reduce the number of refugees arriving at its
borders and break up the profitable smugglers network. The deal
hinges on Turkey taking back all migrants who arrive in Greece
illegally and the EU in turn welcoming an equivalent number of Syrian
refugees from Turkey. In many ways, this arrangement echoes the
U.K.’s approach to the Syrian refugee crisis, in which Britain
accepts refugees from Turkey directly but refuses entry to those who
attempt to cross the border by other means.
The U.N. Refugee
Agency (UNHCR) and various NGOs have announced they will pull out of
Greek refugee camps. They consider the return of migrants to Turkey
an illegal “mass expulsion.” Turkey should not be considered a
safe country, they argue, and Greece’s camps now serve as
“detention centers.”
There is some truth
to these claims, and the EU should take them seriously. But NGOs
haven’t proposed any alternative approaches.
The distribution of
refugees across the EU had been decided in accordance with EU law, in
a way that would have allowed the EU as a whole to cope with large
numbers of refugees. But many national leaders refused to accept the
decision and few refugees have been resettled. For countries such as
Germany, Sweden and Austria, continuing to accept the majority of
refugees has become politically untenable. This became obvious when
Sweden and Austria both moved to close their borders and
anti-immigration parties gained popularity in German regional
elections.
Before the deal was
struck, the trend toward securing the borders — in the Balkans,
Central Europe and Italy — was already gaining momentum. If it had
continued, it could have resulted in a shift in the EU’s external
borders, with Greece and Italy suddenly outside the free-movement
Schengen zone. As a result, a huge number of refugees would have
found themselves in Greece and other countries on the EU’s
periphery — a highly unsatisfactory outcome for everyone involved.
The current deal is
therefore an improvement. The real issue now is implementation. The
Commission has estimated that the practical implementation of the
EU-Turkey agreement will cost around €280 million over the next six
months, a surprisingly low amount.
One of the main
priorities is to send support to Greece, the weakest link in the
chain. The EU needs to urgently deliver on their promised technical
assistance in processing migrants, especially as the UNHCR and NGOs
scale back on their work in the region.
More important still
is general political stability in Greece. The Troika’s return to
Athens to negotiate the terms of further financial assistance should
go hand in hand with a more generous approach to Greek debt
repayments. In particular, it is time to soften the requirement to
drive up primary surpluses to 3.5 percent. This goal is objectively
too high and risks destabilizing the Greek economy and political
system. A change of direction already makes good economic sense —
now the added tension of the refugee crisis makes it even more
urgent.
Another vital aspect
of the deal is accelerating the refugee resettlement process. The
current resettlement agreement foresees at least 20,000 relocations
from Greece by mid-May 2016. This is too few given that around 50,000
refugees are currently in Greece, living in difficult conditions.
Likewise, the EU
needs to expedite its resettlement of refugees from Turkish camps. It
needs to make it clear to refugees contemplating making the dangerous
trip across the border into Europe that they are better off staying
put and waiting for their asylum claims to be processed. The larger
the number of people directly resettled from Turkey to the EU, the
more the EU will be effective in undermining smugglers’ attempts to
find new roads via Libya or the Caucasus.
Unfortunately, we
still don’t know exactly how resettlement from Turkey will be
handled. Germany has started to receive small numbers of Syrians
directly from Turkey, but nothing is known about other EU countries.
The initial
allocation of 72,000 refugees from Turkey to the EU is certainly too
low to effectively deter smugglers from searching for alternative
routes. To do so, EU member states need to fulfill — and then
surpass — their current commitments.
This deal with
Turkey will be difficult to implement. But without it, the EU’s
external borders would collapse completely and Greece and other
border countries would be left to fend for themselves. The focus now
needs to be on supporting Greece generously and on increasing quickly
the number of refugees taken directly from Turkey to undermine the
smugglers and provide humanitarian relief. Without these actions, the
moral compromises made in a deal with Turkey will have been in vain.
Guntram Wolff is
director of the think tank Bruegel.
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