United Nations agencies and rights campaigners oppose the scheme and aim to instruct all those who reach Greece on how to apply for asylum.
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A Greek ecclesiastic website, Dogma, reported Tuesday that Francis was planning to visit refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos on April 15 along with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Archbishop of Athens Ieronymos.
The 45 people sent back on a ferry from Lesbos to the Turkish port Dikili followed a four-day pause.
However, the migrants reacted in anger and said they want to leave for Germany.
Activists have been voicing concerns about sending the deportees to Turkey; a country with a spotty human rights record.
Not a single refugee has drowned in the Aegean after implementation of the EU-Turkey agreement aimed at stemming the flow of refugees to Europe, an EU official has said.
The EU agreed to resettle one Syrian from Turkish camps for every Syrian sent back to the country, which is hosting almost three million people.
But Marc Pierini, visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe, said there were still a host of obstacles to be overcome before Ankara could join the 28-member bloc. “It would be up to the courts to decide”. It has become a lucrative business for people smugglers.
Greece and the European Union are to deport all migrants who arrived on Greek soil after March 20. Please see our terms of service for more information.
French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel and many of their ministers are meeting Thursday in the city of Metz in eastern France.
Any court challenge would be complex and take time.
While Schembri maintains that the vulnerability of each applicant will be taken into consideration by Easo staff when making a recommendation, Amnesty points out that the exact requirements or criteria of what constitutes vulnerability are not defined in any public document.
Questions remain Referring to Syrians, Schembri said Turkey “for one may be safe, but for the other it might not be”.
It cited a “contradiction between the declared goal of returning everyone and the assurances that safeguards and an appeal mechanism will be in place to challenge that”, noting that collective expulsions would be illegal.
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This is because Greece is allowed to deport migrants that either do not apply for asylum or fail in their claims so therefore it would delay the process in being sent back if they go through the asylum seeking process. Until then, any return would be suspended.
