Greece plans to fast-track asylum claims to save EU-Turkey deal

European officials are becoming increasingly worried that the EU-Turkey deal could fall apart. With few returns and thousands of people trapped on the Greek islands, the EU is encouraging stronger measures – such as opening more detention centers on the islands to speed up asylum proceedings and facilitate deportations – to rescue the deal.


In December, Greek migration minister Ioannis Mouzalas and the EU's Maarten Verwey, the deal's coordinator, outlined a road map to expedite returns in an informal action plan seen by Refugees Deeply. The plan aims "to safeguard the benefits of the EU-Turkey statement for the EU," Verwey writes in an introductory note. Its implementation will "eliminate the bulk of pending [asylum] requests in the Greek islands by April 2017," he writes.

Since the EU deal with Turkey went into effect last March, 865 migrants and refugees have been returned to Turkey, among them Syrians who withdrew their request for protection. Recently, a leaked document showed that the U.N. refugee agency is unable to monitor whether most returned Syrians have reacquired protection status in Turkey. Some 1,183 others were returned to Turkey since the beginning of 2016 under an older bilateral Greece-Turkey agreement.

Yet, officially, not one Syrian has been forcibly returned under the terms of the EU-Turkey deal. Meanwhile, arrivals from Turkey, although few in number compared to the period before the deal, continue on a weekly basis. In the first 25 days of 2017, 1,053 people crossed the Aegean Sea to Greece.
 [upi.com]
31/1/17