Dimitris Avramopoulos - Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association

Erdogan: refugees will enter Europe unless EU does more

Nikolaj Nielsen — Mon, 23 Dec 2019 10:45:52 +0000

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (Photo: Council of the European Union).

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has once again used the millions of refugees hosted in the country as a bargaining chip against the European Union.

Speaking alongside Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban on Thursday (7 November), he told reporters the refugees will be allowed into Europe unless the EU provides more support.

“Whether we receive support or not, we will continue to aid the guests we are hosting. But, if this doesn’t work out, then we will have to open the doors,” he said.

Erdogan has in the past made similar statements, often seen as a means to squeeze leverage over a European Union that is intended to maintain a 2016 deal with Ankara to prevent people from landing on the Greek islands.

“In 13 minutes you can get across the stretch of sea between the Turkish coast and the islands on an inflatable boat,” said Michalis Chrisochoidis, Greece’s minister for citizens’ protection, earlier this week.

He said Turkey has an obligation to control the border to Europe and accept returns from the Greek islands.

The latest stand-off comes on the heels of Turkey’s 9 October invasion into north-east Syria, which has since displaced some 180,000 people in a stated aim to create a so-called “safe zone”.

Turkey wants to send Syrian refugees back into that zone amid evidence collected by Human Rights Watch, which says some are being forced against their will.

Relations between the EU and Turkey remain fraught following the de facto freezing of accession talks in June 2018.

“In the last couple of months, we saw a significant increase in irregular migration to the EU from Turkey. This time it is mainly Iranians, Afghanis, Pakistanis,” Maciej Popowski, a senior European Commission official, told MEPs earlier this week.

European commissioner for migration, Dimitris Avramopoulos, also last month in Ankara met Erdogan to discuss how to deal with these three nations’ citizens and ended up pledging an additional €50m to help the Turkish coast guard search and rescue.

The money comes on top of some €6bn of EU funds geared towards helping the 3.6 million Syrian refugees hosted by Turkey with projects running until the end of 2023.

Some 97 percent of the €6bn has already been programmed, says the commission.

Although some is given as direct grants to the Turkish ministries of education, health, and family and social affairs, the bulk is channeled through large international aid agencies.

The commission also says that none of it can be used outside Turkey, meaning at no point will it help fund the repatriation or the reintegration of Syrian refugees in the northeast of Syria.

“We are not going to support resettlements of forced evictions into north Syria or deportations whether it is from Turkey or Lebanon or any other country,” said Popowski.

Similar comments were made by Michael Koehler, another senior EU commission official.

“If ever there was a political decision to support the resettlement of Syrian refugees into Syria, the facility [€6bn] would not be the funding source because legally this is not allowed,” he said.

That political decision will weigh heavily on the United Nations whose secretary-general met with Erdogan in early November to discuss Turkey’s plan to resettle hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees across the border.

The UN says any resettlement must by voluntary, safe and dignified.

Source: https://euobserver.com/migration/146566

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EU Warns Greece Receiving More Refugees from Turkey Than Ever, More Budget Need, Police

Albawaba — Thu, 17 May 2018 10:23:32 +0000

A little girl looks on upon arrival at the northern island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea with other migrants and refugees from Turkey /AFP

The European Union migration officials have warned that Greece is receiving more and more refugees from Turkey this year, pinpointing the need for more budget and personnel to police the borders.

The European Commission said on Wednesday that the arrivals in Greece had increased nine times in March this year compared to the same period last year, adding that 15,457 people had arrived via Turkey on Greece’s sea and land borders through that month.

It said the arrivals were still far lower than those recorded at the peak of Europe’s refugee crisis in 2015, saying a deal with Turkey in March 2016 to help curb arrivals from Syria and other countries was still working.

EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos said progress on containing the refugee flow from both Turkey and places in Africa was good, but he said more work was needed to ensure that borders remained calm.

“In the last years, important progress has been made both within the EU and with our partner countries,” said Avramopoulos, adding, “However, the situation is still fragile and our work is far from over.”

Avramopoulos sad the highest surge in refugee arrivals in Europe was recorded in Spain, where some 6,623 refugees had arrived in the first three months of the year, up 22 percent last year. The surge in arrivals in Spain is mainly due to a drastic decline in the number of refugees arriving from Libya to Italy which came after the EU authorities reached a deal with Libyan militia and government to contain the flow.

Avramopoulos said numbers from Libya had sharply declined in the first quarter of 2018, saying more deployments at the Mediterranean also played a major role.

“This is why I call on member states to urgently send border guards and equipment for the European Border and Coast Guard operations,” he said, adding that the EU’s border agency currently supports 1,500 border guards along all routes taken by refugees.

The EU official said that deployment was less than half of the agency’s operational needs, calling on the EU states to contribute to plans for increased deployment at Greek-Turkish land border and Greece’s land borders with Albania and Macedonia, where more refugee presence has been reported recently.

This article has been adapted from its original source.

Source: https://www.albawaba.com/editorchoice/eu-warns-greece-receiving-more-refugees-turkey-ever-more-budget-need-police-1132742

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Germany rejecting Pakistani asylum seekers for lack of valid documents

Pakistan Today — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 17:59:41 +0000

The number of failed asylum seekers who could not be repatriated from Germany because they lack valid documents jumped 71 per cent in 2017 compared with the previous year, the interior ministry said on Monday.

Around 65,000 failed asylum seekers were granted temporary permission to stay in the country in 2017 because they could not be repatriated due to their lack of identity papers, a ministry spokesman said, up from 38,000 in 2016.

The largest numbers of failed applicants who could not be repatriated because they had no papers were from India (5,743), Pakistan (4,943), Afghanistan (3,915) and Russia (3,828), publishing group Funke Mediengruppe reported, citing an interior ministry internal report.

The nationalities of nearly 3,800 applicants were registered as “unclear”, including people such as Palestinians and Kurds who did not have a country to which they could be deported, the report said.

Germany has been trying to speed up such repatriations since Anis Amri, a Tunisian awaiting deportation, killed 12 people at a Berlin Christmas market in December 2016. Amri’s deportation had been delayed because he had no valid passport.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision in 2015 to welcome more than a million migrants has provoked a popular backlash and increased support for the far-right Alternative for Germany party.

Migration policy was one of the most disputed issues for Merkel’s conservatives and the centre-left Social Democrats in renewing their coalition this month.

The number of people who applied for asylum fell in 2017, however, coming in well below the maximum 220,000 agreed on by the coalition parties.

Cooperation between German authorities and the embassies of the countries of origin of failed applicants, to issue substitute passports, was going poorly in many cases, the report said.

Earlier this month, Europe’s top migration official, Dimitris Avramopoulos, said the European Union wanted to tighten visa requirements for applicants from countries that were not cooperating enough on migrant deportations.

Source: https://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2018/03/27/germany-rejecting-pakistani-asylum-seekers-for-lack-of-valid-documents/

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