An early April deadline to start sending asylum seekers back to Turkey is not realistic, the United Nations refugee agency has said, amid confusion in Greece over whether the EU’s landmark deal with Ankara can work.
EU officials in Brussels said on Monday that economic migrants not deemed to have valid asylum claims were to be returned as soon as possible, while asylum seekers might be returned from 4 April onwards, unless they were able to prove they were at risk in Turkey.
But the head of the UNHCR in Europe, Vincent Cochetel, said the latter deadline did not appear workable.
“I am not sure 4 April is a realistic deadline to see the implementation of the deal,” he told the Guardian. “For those applying for asylum … I don’t see how it could be implemented on time.” The main problem, he said, would be getting specialist asylum case workers in place in time to hear individual cases.
EU leaders agreed with Ankara last week that most refugees and migrants who arrived on Greek shores after Saturday would be sent back to Turkey. But this requires building a functioning asylum system on the Greek islands in barely a fortnight.
Under the deal, a small army of 4,000 staff, consisting of police officers, asylum cases officers, judges and interpreters, will be sent to the Greek islands to process refugee claims and returns. The first wave of personnel is expected to arrive next Monday, with the first ferries carrying asylum seekers to Turkey expected to set sail a week later.
Although EU member states will provide more than half the staff, debt-ridden Athens faces a mammoth task in getting 1,500 staff in place at a time when public sector recruitment is frozen.
In Greece, confusion surrounded enforcement of the deal. Holding talks with visiting EU migration commissioner, Dimitris Avramopoulos, the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, questioned the efficacy of the deal if thousands of refugees continued to enter the country from Turkey.
“Unfortunately [on Sunday] there was a high number of arrivals, some 1,500,” he said. “If a reduction of flows does not happen, we won’t be able to evacuate the islands successfully so that the deal can start to be implemented fully.”
Greek government figures showed that by Monday, the official onset of spring, 50,411 refugees and migrants had crossed the Aegean with over 13,000 trapped in the squalid camp of Idomeni on the sealed Greek-Macedonian border. Acknowledging the teething problems, Avramopoulos accepted that the influx would not be reduced “in a night”.
But he insisted that implementation was key to Europe’s ability to curb the biggest movement of people into the continent since the second world war. “We are at a crucial turning point,” he told reporters. “The management of the refugee crisis for Europe as a whole hinges on the outcome and success of this agreement.”
Greek government officials emphasised that much would depend on the 28-nation bloc following up on its promise to dispatch what Tsipras described as “human resources” to help deal with the crisis.
The Dutch economist, who led the EU’s taskforce in Greece during the country’s bailout negotiations, Maarten Verwey, has been appointed to take charge of coordinating action on the ground, in a sign the Greek government has ceded control of managing asylum and migration policy.
Getting the asylum system up and running on the Greek islands is vital for the EU, as claims of the deal’s conformity with international law rest on the fact that each asylum seeker will have an individual hearing and right of appeal.
But the promise of individual hearings has not put the UNHCR’s concerns to rest.
Cochtel said the agency had “some concerns about the return of Afghans to Turkey” because they faced the risk of refoulement, being returned to a warzone. Afghans and other non-Syrians in Turkey are less likely to gain refugee status than those fleeing Bashar al-Assad’s war, he said.
Turkey had passed “a good asylum law” in May 2014, Cochetel said, but “in practice the law is not well implemented and it is just impossible to think that Turkey will fix those gaps in the coming days”. He urged asylum judges in Greece to be cautious and not to assume that Turkey was safe for everyone.
Although the agency thinks the EU-Turkey deal is just about on the right side of the law, staff were left fuming when the European commission gave the impression the UNHCR was working with the EU to return refugees and migrants to Turkey. In a briefing note published on Saturday, the commission said “the UNHCR will be a key actor in the readmission [return] and resettlement processes”.
This communique was “a bit misleading” and did “not exactly reflect what will be our role”, Cochetel said, stressing the UNHCR would not be involved in returning people to Turkey.
The UNHCR has also stopped providing bus services for migrants on the islands of Lesbos and Chios, since reception centres were turned into places of detention, a decision Cochetel said was “problematic” and “not our vocation”. Although the agency does not advocate that no one should be detained, it rejects a policy of mass detentions for failed asylum seekers and irregular migrants. Under EU law asylum, migrants who have been denied asylum and other can be held in detention centres until they are deported.
Ketty Kehayioy, spokeswoman for the UN refugee agency in Athens, raised concerns the deal would be implemented without required safeguards: “Greece doesn’t have a system for addressing asylum claims in place,” she said. “There is a lot of confusion. We are trying to understand how this whole thing will be implemented.”
Building an asylum system on the Greek islands in a fortnight
Around 4,000 staff – asylum caseworkers, judges, interpreters and border guards – are being sent to the Greek islands to ensure that every single person claiming the right to remain in Europe will have an interview and the right to appeal.
More than half will be police and security staff to manage the high number of returns to Turkey. The first boats carrying Syrian refugees back to Turkey are expected to leave port from 4 April, but those not claiming asylum are expected to be returned even sooner.
Around 2,500 of the total staff are to come from other EU countries and the remainder from Greece. So far 20 of the EU’s 27 remaining countries (excluding Greece) have made pledges to send staff, including Germany and France, who will each send 300 asylum experts and police. The UK has not yet made any public pledge to send staff.
Here is what the European commission thinks is needed:
- 600 asylum case workers
- 400 interpreters
- 10 appeals committees made up of 30 Greek judges, 30 judges from other EU member states and 30 interpreters
- 325 people to manage returns: 25 Greek officers, 50 experts from the EU border agency Frontex, 250 Greek police
- 1,500 police officers
- 1,000 army and security staff
- 8 vessels with capacity for up to 400 people and 28 buses
- 20,000 places in short-term accommodation on Greek islands (6,000 already exist).
