Refugees and migrants arriving in Europe will be sent back across the Aegean sea under the terms of a deal between the EU and Turkey that has been criticised by aid agencies as inhumane.
In an agreement that raises the prospect of a desperate last-minute rush to Greek shores by refugees and migrants hoping to beat the deadline of midnight on Saturday, the European council president, Donald Tusk, resolved sticking points with Turkey’s prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, before all of the EU’s 28 leaders approved the deal at talks in Brussels.
Anyone arriving after Saturday midnight can expect to be returned to Turkey in the coming weeks. The UN’s refugee agency said big questions remained about how the deal would work in practice and called for urgent improvements to Greece’s system for assessing refugees.
“I want to take the opportunity to tell the refugees at Idomeni that they should trust the Greek government and move to other accommodation where the conditions will be significantly better,” Merkel said. She added that “from there, Greece will put asylum procedures in motion or redistribution to other European countries will take place”.
In exchange for taking in refugees, Turkey can expect “re-energised” talks on its EU membership, with the promise of negotiations on one policy area to be opened before July. Although this is a climbdown by Turkey, after Cyprus blocked a more ambitious restart of accession talks, Davutoğlu said it was “a historic day” for EU-Turkey relations.
The controversial one-for-one deal remains intact: for every Syrian refugee that the EU sends back across the Aegean, a Syrian in Turkey will be given a new home in Europe. But a cap of 72,000 places has been put on Syrians who will be given asylum in Europe, far short of the 108,000 a year recommended by international aid agencies, if the EU is to do its fair share. The scheme will be stopped once more than 72,000 people have been settled in Europe, amid concerns among some countries of an “open-ended commitment”.
On Turkey’s most prized objective of easing visa restrictions, Davutoğlu was confident this could be done by Ankara’s preferred end of June deadline, although his government has only met half of the EU’s 72 bureaucratic conditions.
Anyone making an asylum claim in Greece would be guaranteed a personal interview and the right of appeal. In theory, this would allow asylum seekers, for example Kurds, to make a case for not being sent back to Turkey.
Athens and EU authorities will have to build a functioning asylum system in Greece within days. About 4,000 extra staff – judges, case officers, border guards and translators – will need to be sent from across the EU to the Greek islands to ensure claims can be processed at an estimated cost of up to €300m. “Greece is faced by a herculean task, it is the largest challenge the EU has yet faced,” said the European commission president Jean-Claude Juncker.
The returns programme will not apply to the 45,000 refugees and migrants now in Greece, who can expect to be relocated to other countries in the EU.
EU officials expressed confidence that a target of resettling 6,000 refugees a month around the bloc was possible, despite laggardly progress on existing schemes. “We expect we will be able to reach this number because member states at this meeting and previous meetings have promised to step up their efforts,” Juncker said. But the scale of the task is underscored by slow progress on existing schemes: a plan to relocate 160,000 refugees from Greece and Italy to other EU countries has led to fewer than 1,000 finding new homes.
