Turkey and the European Union say they have agreed on key points of a “bold” proposal to resolve the migrant crisis, aimed at deterring migrants from attempting the perilous journey to Europe.
Under the proposed deal, Ankara would agree to take back all migrants who leave Turkey’s shores for Europe in the future, including those intercepted in its territorial waters, on the condition that one legitimate Syrian refugee is resettled in Europe for every Syrian returned to Turkey.
International humanitarian organizations have harshly criticized parts of the agreement, with a senior official from the U.N. refugee agency saying Tuesday that sending back refugees en masse would not be “consistent with European law.”
“An agreement that would be tantamount to a blanket return to a third country is not consistent with European law, not consistent with international law,” Vincent Cochetel, Europe regional director of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, told reporters in Geneva, Switzerland.
Tusk: Irregular migration into Europe is ‘over’
The EU-Turkey plan, which still requires details to be hammered out before it is sent for approval by EU leaders in nine days, would also see the EU provide Turkey with additional funding to provide for refugees, speed up talks on Turkey joining the EU, and accelerate the lifting of visa requirements for Turkish citizens in Europe.
“The days of irregular migration to the European Union are over,” said Donald Tusk, president of the European Council — as the group of 28 EU leaders is known — at the end of Monday’s emergency summit in Brussels, Belgium.
He said Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu had “confirmed Turkey’s commitment to accept the rapid return of all migrants coming from Turkey to Greece that are not in need of international protection.”
“The EU will support Greece in ensuring comprehensive, large scale and fast-track returns to Turkey,” Tusk said.
A statement from EU heads of government released at the end of the summit said they agreed that “bold moves were needed” to break the business model of the smugglers, highlighting the importance of a NATO anti-trafficking mission in the Aegean Sea that has just expanded into Greek and Turkish territorial waters.
“We need to break the link between getting in a boat and getting settlement in Europe,” read the statement.
Davutoglu said that his country, which hosts more Syrian refugees than any other, was motivated to enter into the arrangement primarily out of humanitarian concern.
“We don’t want to see women and children dying in the Aegean Sea,” he told reporters, according to Turkey’s semiofficial Anadolu news agency.
Balkans migration route ‘closed’
European leaders have been grappling with the biggest refugee crisis since World War II, with more than a million people fleeing conflict and poverty in the Middle East and elsewhere having entered EU territory since the start of 2015. Most of the migrant flow is from Syria, where the civil war has created more than 4 million refugees and displaced a further 6 million within the country.
The majority have come by using trafficking networks to cross the Aegean Sea, which separates Turkey and Greece, before heading overland through the Balkans to Germany and other northern European destination countries.
The crossing is dangerous, with more than 400 migrants having died making the journey so far this year, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Recently, a number of countries along the Balkan migration route agreed to all but close their borders, leaving a growing bottleneck of desperate migrants stranded in Greece, a country already struggling with a debt crisis.
More than 11,000 people are stuck in a backlog at Idomeni on the Greece-Macedonia border, in a transit camp designed for 1,500, according to Doctors Without Borders.
Tusk confirmed at the end of Monday’s summit that EU leaders had decided to “end the ‘wave-through approach'” through countries along the overland route to Western Europe.
“Irregular flows of migrants along the Western Balkans route have now come to an end,” the EU heads of government said in a joint statement.
Tusk said the EU would deploy “massive humanitarian assistance” to Greece to help it respond to the effects of the route’s closure, and would also offer further assistance for it to manage its external border, and help facilitate the “comprehensive, large scale and fast-track” return of migrants to Turkey.
Migrants had been sent back from Greece to Turkey last week, Tusk said, in what he described as the “first visible step” of a Greek-Turkish bilateral agreement on the swift return of migrants not in need of international protection “becoming more operational and effective.”
Concerns about the proposal
Other humanitarian organizations were quick to join the U.N. refugee agency, or UNHCR, in criticizing the proposal — in particular, the mass return of refugees to Turkey.
Amnesty International said in a statement that the plan showed an “alarmingly short-sighted and inhumane attitude” to the migrant crisis and would deal a “death blow to the right to seek asylum.”
The statement said that Amnesty opposed “the concept of a ‘safe third country’ in general, as this undermines the individual right to have asylum claims fully and fairly processed,” and that there was “huge cause for concern” about sending migrants to Turkey in particular, “given the current situation and treatment of migrants and refugees.”
The statement attacked the “horse trading” concept of resettling a Syrian refugee in Europe for every compatriot sent back to Turkey, saying the proposal would effectively make “every resettlement place offered to a Syrian in the EU contingent upon another Syrian risking their life by embarking on the deadly sea route to Greece.”
“The idea of bartering refugees for refugees is not only dangerously dehumanizing, but also offers no sustainable long term solution to the ongoing humanitarian crisis,” said Iverna McGowan, head of Amnesty’s European Institutions Office.
It also expressed concern about the closure of the Balkan migration route, which would “lead to thousands of vulnerable people being left in the cold with no clear plan on how their urgent humanitarian needs and rights to international protection would be dealt with.”
The International Rescue Committee lauded the meeting Monday but warned that “closing all of Europe’s borders without offering alternative routes to safety will not work.”
“In fact,” the organization said, “the only winners will be the smugglers, as people take more elaborate and more dangerous routes to safety.”
UNHCR spokesman William Spindler said refugees should be returned to a third country only if certain safeguards were in place, such as a protections against “refoulement,” a legal term used to describe returning asylum seekers somewhere they would be at risk.
Spindler called for the details of these safeguards to be clarified before the proposal was next put to EU leaders at a crisis meeting scheduled for March 17.
More funding to Turkey
Late last year, the EU and Turkey agreed to a joint action plan in response to the migrant crisis, in which European leaders agreed to pay Turkey 3 billion euros ($3.3 billion) to support its refugee population and target people-smuggling networks — a mission that has seen NATO warships deployed to the eastern Mediterranean this year.
Tusk said that “despite good implementation” of that plan, it had failed to sufficiently reduce the migrant flow, and extra steps were necessary.
The new proposal would focus on speeding up the disbursement of the 3 billion euros already pledged to Turkey, as well as providing new funding to alleviate the crisis. Turkey requested an extra 3 billion euros at the summit Monday, according to European Parliament President Martin Schulz.
Syrian refugees settled in the EU under the terms of the proposed deal with Turkey would be distributed among member states “within the framework of the existing commitments,” a joint statement from the EU heads of government said.
Last year, the EU agreed to resettle 160,000 refugees, but less than 1,000 have been processed so far.