On Wednesday 14 March, the European Commission proposed that member states should mobilise additional funding of €3 billion for the Facility for Syrian refugees in Turkey, Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos announced.
Like the first facility decided in 2016, which also amounted to €3 billion, the Commission has suggested that one billion should come from the European budget and two billion from member states.
Contrary to what has been said, the commissioner explained, the whole of the first sum of €3 billion was “totally disbursed”. The EU “kept its promises 100%”, he added.
The Commission explained that the money had been allocated to over 70 projects in the field of education and healthcare. It allowed, it says, for 500,000 children to gain access to schooling and for 1.2 million refugees to benefit from monthly cash transfers. At the end of December 2017, the Commission had effectively paid out €1.85 billion. Turkey, for its part, has said on several occasions that the sum had not been made fully available and that the amounts were released too slowly.
Is this new instalment proposed on Wednesday a sign that the EU agrees to recompense Turkey despite problems relating to rule of law and tensions with Greece over incursions into its territory?
Avramopoulos gave his assurance that the funding was not intended for Turkey but for refugees present in Turkey and that, while bearing in mind the difficulties, cooperation between the EU and Turkey remained necessary to meet “common challenges”.
In 2016, the Facility for Refugees had been decided to accompany the EU-Turkey statement of 18 March of the same year, allowing Turkish coastguards to prevent any departure to the EU and to repatriate all migrants arriving in the EU illegally immediately to Turkey, including the Syrian asylum seekers.
According to the situational analysis presented by the Commission that same day, the EU-Turkey agreement continues, moreover, to “produce results, with the number of illegal migrants arriving in dangerous conditions remaining 97% lower than for the period prior to application of the declaration”. The Commission says 12,476 Syrian refugees have also been resettled in the EU from Turkey since 2015, between the resettlement decision in 2015 and the new European programme for 50,000 resettlement places announced after summer 2017.
The European Commission believes this new tranche of financial aid in favour of refugees makes it possible to “give a strong signal [indicating] that Turkey and the EU are completely committed in this relationship”. The EU-Turkey summit in Varna, scheduled for 26 March in theory, should also make it possible to place all issues on the table. The Commission wants a “successful” summit, said the commissioner. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)