Deal with Turkey necessary on migration

Austrian analyst and head of the European Stability Initiative Gerald Knaus stresses the need for Greece and other countries to pressure for changes in the European Union’s refugee legislation.

“[Greek Prime Minister] Kyriakos Mitsotakis and other leaders shouldn’t just watch this debate like a traffic accident in Germany. They should come up with proposals that would be in the interest of Germany and in the interest of everyone. In my opinion, this is the proposal for safe third countries that would receive asylum seekers.”

The initiator of the 2016 agreement between the European Union and Turkey on migration notes the need to allow safe third country agreements along the lines of this 2016 agreement.

The agreement, signed in March 2016, provided for a rapid assessment by the Greek authorities of a newcomer’s eligibility for asylum and, in the event of a negative decision, their rapid return to Turkey. The deal also included the payment of 6 billion euros to Turkey to support some 4 million Syrian refugees living in the country.

Critics have called it a cynical deal, a departure from European values and an outsourcing of European asylum policy to the authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But German Chancellor Angela Merkel threw her political weight behind the deal. Flows have been significantly reduced, but the deal also led to the shameful images of the Moria camp on the eastern Aegean island of Lesvos. However, as Knaus says, the period 2016-2019 was the only one in which there was a real reduction of flows in Germany.

“The only constructive way that doesn’t lead to the destruction of Schengen and real pressure on EU law is a new working cooperation with Turkey or other third countries, which would be in the interest of Greece and in the interest of Germany.”

Greece, along with 14 other countries, has been supporting the so-called Danish initiative, which calls for agreements with third countries, since last May.

A gift to the extreme right

Knaus argues that what the German opposition Christian Democrats are calling for – that anyone arriving at the German border should be returned to their previous European country of origin – cannot work in practice. “As Greece knows, and as everyone in Southeastern Europe knows, it is not easy to close borders, and especially not when the countries to which you send people back say that this is not in accordance with the law and will not help you,” he explains.

‘I don’t see how building detention centers and asylum reception centers on the border of the EU solves any problem’

But the German opposition’s stance put enormous pressure on the government, which responded with checks with all its border countries, a rather pointless measure since Germany already had checks with the countries where the flows actually came from. “The government has made a rather unworkable proposal,” he says, adding that the arguments of the government and the opposition “provide the far-right with the perfect election issue.”

He points out that there was a misdiagnosis of the problem on the part of the EU regarding the pact on migration that member-states agreed to last spring. This made it unworkable from the start.

After all, as he says, a fundamental problem with EU law is that it is violated anyway, with no consequences. If this does not change, it does not matter what the law says. For example, Hungary has already abolished the right to asylum, Poland has legalized repatriation to Belarus, while in Finland they are discussing repatriation to Russia.

“I don’t see how building detention centers and asylum reception centers on the border of the EU solves any problem, because after you have processed the applications, the people will still be here,” he says. “I’m afraid this could turn into an existential crisis for the EU, if the EU is blamed for the failure to deal with migration.”