Externalisation of Asylum: The EU-Turkey Deal

In November 2015, the European Union decided to provide significant funding to the Turkish authorities, establishing the Facility for Refugees in Turkey. On March 18th 2016, the Members of the European Council and their Turkish counterpart agreed that all new irregular migrants crossing from Turkey into Greek islands would be returned to Turkey. Within the following days, the provisions of the Asylum Procedures Directive concerning the “first country of asylum” and the “safe third country” concepts were applied for the first time in Greece, in order to reject applications as inadmissible and return asylum seekers to Turkey. While financial support and capacity building to the country hosting the largest number of Syrian refugees seems to be on the right direction towards responsibility-sharing in the field of refugee-protection, the effects of the decision to return asylum-seekers to Turkey should be further examined. More precisely, well-documented violations of asylum seekers’ right to asylum, refoulement, arbitrary detention, non-respect of social rights and ineffective judicial protection in Turkey (especially after the failed coup attempt of July 2016 ) coupled with the lack of procedural safeguards in Greece, raise serious concerns. In light of potential violations of International and European Law in case of forced returns of asylum seekers to Turkey from the Greek islands, this paper will focus on the gap between burden-shifting and responsibility-sharing in the current context of externalization of EU asylum policy.