Brussels, 10/03/2016 (Agence Europe) - On Thursday 10 March, the EU's home affairs ministers gave a fairly warm welcome to the draft agreement between the European Union and Turkey, as presented at the EU-Turkey summit on Monday 7 March (see EUROPE 11506).
“The Council gives a positive welcome to the Turkish proposals”, which are a “good proposal for putting a brake on migration”, said the Dutch secretary of sate for security and justice, Klaas Dijkhoff. Once this agreement is sealed, “the home affairs ministers will have an important role to play. We today confirmed that we were ready to act in this direction”, Dijkhoff said.
The draft agreement from the European summit, for which the initiative is officially attributed to Ankara but largely influenced by Berlin, provides for Ankara automatically taking back all migrants that arrive illegally in Greece through smuggler networks. This will take place according to a timetable still to be defined and will include those migrants who are able to claim international protection. In exchange, the EU will reportedly commit to giving additional money to Turkey and promising to resettle refugees on EU territory, especially Syrians. These refugees are currently being hosted in Turkey and will be sent to the EU according to the one-for-one principle (one refugee will be resettled in the EU in exchange for one migrant being sent back to Turkey from Greece). Europeans will also reportedly accelerate granting Ankara a visa liberalisation scheme, and will agree to open new EU accession negotiation chapters.
While the ministers generally welcomed this draft agreement as regards the section on sending migrants back to Turkey, legal questions nevertheless remain. The ministers underlined the need to respect international and European law, although the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein on Thursday described the draft as “illegal”. It is also important to be “careful about the alternative routes issue”, a European source stated. This concern has especially been raised by Italy, which fears a new migration route via Albania - even though no statistics currently confirm this hypothesis.
On Thursday, the Turkish secretary of state for foreign affairs, Volkan Bozkir, announced that this future draft agreement would not concern the migrants who have already arrived on the Greek islands. “The proposal made by Turkey does not concern the migrants who are currently on the Greek islands”, he told Turkey's pro-government news agency Anatolia. In Bozkir's view, the readmissions will involve tens of thousands of people.
However, things are more complex on the legal level, and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker himself acknowledged on Thursday that Turkey, like Greece, would perhaps have legislative changes to make so that Turkey can be fully described as a safe third country - a status which would enable Ankara to take back the migrants who are able to claim international protection.
Turkey has only partially ratified the Geneva Convention. Several questions have been raised regarding the fact that Turkey has only partially ratified the Geneva Convention on refugees. Ankara lays down a geographical restriction, and only offers full protection to the nationals of member countries of the Council of Europe, leaving the nationals of other countries with a more precarious status. These legislative changes required of Turkey could concern full ratification of the Geneva Convention - a possibility that European Commission sources have not however confirmed.
For Greece, the question arises as to the legal instrument for considering Turkey as a safe third country - a legal instrument that only partially exists. However, opinions diverge on the need to have European level recognition of Turkey as a safe country. While, for some, this European level recognition is needed to make the one-for-one principle work, for others, it is enough just to have decisions taken at the national level describing Turkey as a third country.
At European level, a list of safe countries was proposed in September 2015 but it only focuses on the countries of safe origin (see EUROPE 11385). In concrete terms, for Turkey this only concerns Turkish nationals, who could be sent back to their country described as safe, but does not concern the nationals of other third countries who travel through Turkey to enter the EU, and who must use separate instruments. This, said European Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship Dimitris Avramopoulos, is a subtlety which does not only concern Greece but the whole EU.
In the face of this legal confusion, an expert from the legal service of the Council of the EU told the ministers that it was possible to build a system that respects international law. Several criteria must be respected: collective expulsion is not possible and an individual assessment of each application from a migrant who has arrived in the EU is necessary. The decisions to refuse these applications are possible, however, if the country from which the migrant comes is a third country that is safe, a source stated. However, if a refusal is made and this is contested by a migrant, it will still be necessary to know if suspensory appeal is possible. On Thursday, the home affairs ministers seemed to tilt towards non-suspensory appeal. These are all elements that will have to be decided upon by the European summit on 17-18 March.
The ministers have nevertheless voiced their reservation about other aspects of the EU-Turkey plan currently being put together - especially about the issue of visas. While they agreed on the principle of accelerating the granting of a visa-free regime, this must not be done at the price of criteria sold off cheaply. Ankara must indeed respect 72 criteria, and “it is far from this”, the source said.
Other ministers also publicly criticised the Turkish government's attacks on freedom of the press, when they arrived in Brussels. “I find it worrying that Turkey puts a newspaper that is critical of the government under state control, then three days later presents a wish-list”, said Austria's home affairs minister, Johanna Mikl-Leitner. “I wonder if we still have respect for ourselves and our values”, she said, also hailing the fact that the Balkans migration route has been locked, thus blocking migrants in Greece or in the Balkans countries.
Help to Greece and relocations. The ministers also discussed help for Greece and the majority of them considered that Athens was a priority, with the country currently at risk of a humanitarian crisis. Commitments have been made for several financial support instruments for Athens. The Greek authorities were pleased with the empathy of their partners, a source stated. Other commitments taken for Greece include all the ministers confirming that the refugee relocation process must be accelerated. Avramopoulous said that from the 885 refugees thus far relocated, the pace must be accelerated to “6,000 per month”. He believed that the ministers had made positive comments about this. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic with Maëlle Didion)