Merkel is also under pressure to broach concerns about freedom of speech restrictions in Turkey.
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Earlier Saturday they visited a refugee camp and an EU-funded center for Syrian refugee children to promote a Turkey-EU deal on stemming the flow of refugees.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited a refugee camp on the Turkish-Syrian border on Saturday, kicking off a high-stakes visit aimed at boosting a month-old migrant deal plagued by moral and legal concerns.
But European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said this week that Turkey must meet all 72 conditions for visa-free travel and the EU would not water down its criteria, rebuffing a warning from Davutoglu that Turkey would no longer need to honor the deal if the promises were not met.
More than 1 million people made “irregular arrivals” inside Europe’s borders in 2015 alone, many of them displaced by the Syrian civil war. While Turkey has upgraded human rights protections for Syrians returned from Greece, it has yet to offer the same guarantees to the much more numerous Afghans, Iraqis and Eritreans who are being returned from Greece and could qualify for the same protection under global asylum laws. “This message must be heard by President Erdogan”.
Angela Merkel managed to reach an agreement with Turkey, but here difficulties for the German Chancellors are only to start, Arne Delfs, the Bloomberg reporter believes. Surveys of Syrian refugees in Gaziantep by the Syrian Relief Network, a coalition of NGOs, suggest that only a third of the city’s Syrian children go to school, partly because of a lack of capacity and partly because they are put to work by parents who can not earn enough on the black market to support their families.
Barack Obama says a recent deal between the European Union and Turkey takes a step toward fairer sharing of the job of housing refugees.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, left, poses with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte as she arrives for the ceremony of the Four Freedoms Award in Middelburg, Netherlands, Thursday, April 21, 2016.
Ahead of the trip, Tusk’s office said: “Disbursements from the EU’s newly established facility for refugees in Turkey are ongoing and the identification and planning for further projects has intensified”. “As the agreement is implemented, it will be essential that migrants are treated properly and that human rights are upheld”.
More than 100 people have taken advantage of an unusually low tide to wade around a border fence that juts out into to the Mediterranean Sea to enter Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta.
Television footage transmitted on state broadcaster TVE’s news bulletin showed police intercepting the migrants as they approached Ceuta’s beach.
Under the terms of the March 18 agreement between the European Union and Turkey, migrants who cross into Greece illegally after March 20 are being sent back to Turkey.
Judith Sunderland, Human Rights Watch’s acting deputy director for Europe, said that instead of “touring a sanitized refugee camp”, the delegation “should go to the detention centre for people who were abusively deported from Greece”.
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The 47-nation Council of Europe, a human rights body that is not part of the EU, passed a resolution Wednesday criticizing the EU-Turkey deal for what it called “several serious human rights issues”.
