President Recep Tayyip Erdogan after Friday prayer in Istanbul. Demotix/ Sahan Nuhoglu. All rights reserved.(Istanbul)–As the EU bends over
backward to get Turkey to accept a deal to prevent Syrian and other refugees,
asylum seekers, and migrants from leaving its shores or crossing its western
borders, it’s worth thinking hard about what’s at stake.
Whatever short-term gains such an
agreement might offer the EU and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, such a deal may
come at the expense of efforts by the EU to address Turkey’s long-term human
rights problems that threaten regional stability. It risks trapping ever
greater numbers of asylum seekers in Turkey, which lacks a functioning system
to protect them. And it sacrifices much of the EU’s remaining leverage with
Ankara at a time when human rights and the rule of law in Turkey are at the
worst level I’ve seen in the 12 years I’ve worked on Turkey’s human rights.
Far from being a safe country for
refugees, as the EU deal contends, Turkey is also an increasingly unsafe
country for its own population — not least because its political leaders have
opted for a repressive and intimidating campaign against all political rivals
and critics.
Turkey is generously hosting over two
million Syrian refugees under a “temporary protection” system. Many others,
including Iraqis and Afghans, lack even that status in Turkey even though they
too come from refugee-producing countries.
Turkey could certainly benefit from
financial help from the EU to cope with this reality, not least to help provide
education for the refugee children living in Turkey’s cities, 80 percent of
whom are not going to school. But leaving aside financial enticements, the
reality is that beyond generosity, Turkey does not possess a functioning asylum
system.
When it signed up to the UN Refugee
Convention, Turkey failed to lift the original World War II geographical
limitation that applied the treaty only to European refugees. As a result
people arriving from the south and east of its borders — such as Syrians,
Iraqis, and Afghans — have no right to asylum or full refugee status in
Turkey. They can only be processed in Turkey for future resettlement in third
countries or, as the Syrians have been, granted temporary protection as an
exercise of political discretion.
Turkey has no provisions in law to grant
non-European refugees full rights or to ensure that they will not be sent back
to places where they are at risk, even though Turkey’s international human rights
obligations require such protection.
The crux of the EU action plan is that
Turkey should keep asylum seekers and migrants within its borders. A brief
glance at a map should show that Turkey’s long coast and proximity to Greek
islands means that it is highly unlikely that Turkey could keep everyone who
wishes to from leaving the country. Sealing its eastern and southern borders to
prevent people from even reaching Turkey, a stated goal of the draft action plan, might be easier to accomplish but would put many lives at risk.
Beyond a crackdown on smuggling gangs,
keeping people in Turkey would entail a draconian regime of police controls all
around the coastline and mass preventive detention of people who might be
assembling to leave.
This is a grim prospect for anyone who
knows anything about the record of abusive policing in Turkey and it should
alert us to major concerns about Turkey, which the EU is conveniently choosing
not to mention.
Huge crackdown
Arrests as Turkey bans march in memory of victims of Oct 10 bombing. Demoted/ Sahan Nuhoglu. All rights reserved.In a bid to hang onto power after
indecisive elections earlier this year, the Justice and Development Party
government presided over by President Erdoğan has cracked down ruthlessly on
the media in the run up to the November 1 general election, done little to
distance itself from violent attacks on the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic
Party (HDP) and on the Doğan media group and one of its well-known journalists,
and used the courts to pursue and lock up enemies.
Over the summer the government willingly
resumed an armed conflict with the armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) after
abandoning a peace process that many in Turkey welcomed after decades of
fighting and deaths. As the hostilities are being played out in the towns, the
cost to civilians has been huge, with hundreds of deaths on all sides over less
than three months. On top of that, a bombing in Ankara killing over 100 people
shows the closeness of the Syria war and Turkey’s failure to tackle the ISIS
threat.
It is scandalous and short-sighted that
the EU is willing to ignore the huge crackdown under way in Turkey in its
attempt to secure a deal to keep out refugees. Besides opening negotiations
that dangle the carrot of visa liberalization for Turkish citizens, the
European Commission has proposed a regulation to designate Turkey a safe country of origin. This means that Turkish
citizens, such as journalists and Kurds fleeing state abuse, would
presumptively be assumed not to face persecution if they apply for
asylum in the EU. This, despite a 23 percent approval rate for asylum
applications from Turkish nationals in the EU in 2014, the same year the
European Court of Human Rights found 94 violations of human rights by Turkey.
And delaying the publication of the
annual European Commission Progress Report on Turkey’s steps towards EU
membership until after the Turkish elections, suggests the EU is willing to
soft-pedal Turkey’s abusive rights record in exchange for its cooperation in
stopping asylum seekers and migrants.
Keeping refugees in a country that
cannot be described as safe for them, and limiting access to asylum in Europe
for Turkey’s own citizens when they may need it most, risks contributing to
greater instability within Turkey. Will this be the EU’s poisonous contribution
to Turkey’s future?
