Brussels, 23/05/2016 (Agence Europe) - The Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, are expected to meet the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on Monday 23 May in Istanbul. This meeting will take place as part of the UN World Summit on Refugees and will include discussions about the EU/Turkey agreement's implementation, as part of their bilateral relations (see EUROPE 11555).
These talks are taking place just after a Greek court delivered a ruling on Friday 20 May. It ruled that a Syrian asylum seeker could not be sent back to Turkey because the country was not considered safe. This decision casts a shadow over the overall way in which the EU/Turkey agreement of 18 March is working. The whole basis of this agreement is to send back asylum seekers from Greece to Turkey and resettle Syrian refugees from Turkey in the EU.
On Friday 20 May, EU Ministers for the Interior and the Commissioner for Home Affairs, Dimitris Avramopoulos, repeated their support for the EU/Turkey agreement and explained that they would continue to consider Turkey as a safe country and that Greece should continue to do the same (EUROPE 11555).
Without providing a precise answer to this question raised by the Greek court, which has a direct link to the legality or not of the mechanism of 18 March, the Commission repeated on Monday 23 May that all asylum seekers in Greece were being treated in compliance with international law and that each situation was being studied on a case-by-case basis. Margaritis Schinas, a spokesperson for the Commission said that the latter considered that the guarantees provided by Turkey are "equivalent to those in the Geneva Convention". The Spokesperson also said that the decision by the Greek Court is "Probably a result of the fact that the law is being applied". (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)