News of the papal visit came as a last-minute rush of asylum applications stalled operations to return migrants from Greece to Turkey under the EU-Turkey deal signed in March, although officials said the forced returns would continue Wednesday.
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Danish police say a law passed two months ago that requires refugees and migrants to hand over valuables worth more than 10,000 kroner ($1,500) has not resulted to a single seizure.
Wenzel Michalski, director of the German branch of Human Rights Watch, said in Lesbos: “The EU and Greece are doing something really disturbing and illegal, and they’re just treating refugees as human trash which should be cleaned away and this is a tragic development”.
Greece, struggling with a huge debt crisis, plays a key role in the implementation of the deal which reflects the bloc’s handling of its worst refugee crisis in decades. They said 66 migrants on board the boat from Chios included 42 Afghans.
Rights groups and some European politicians have challenged the legality of the deal, questioning whether Turkey has sufficient safeguards in place to defend refugees’ rights and whether it can be considered safe for them.
The source in the governor’s office of Izmir province on the Aegean coast did not give details on the logistics or the nationalities of the migrants who were to be returned.
The Commission said in a document to EU institutions that “significant structural weaknesses and shortcomings” in the current system were rife, which placed “a disproportionate responsibility” on some nations, while others, mostly eastern European members, sought to shield their countries from having to carry much of the refugee burden.
One such commitment is that the European Union will take in one Syrian refugee directly from Turkish refugee camps in return for every Syrian the bloc returns to Turkey, with a cap at 72,000 asylum-seekers.
Under the EU’s deal with Turkey reached last month, those arriving on Greek islands from March 20 onwards who do not apply for asylum in Greece or whose application is rejected or deemed inadmissible will be deported back to Turkey.
Many are already due to be deported to Turkey but the steady arrival of migrants in Greece remains a challenge for authorities. Still it pales compared to the more than 2.7 million registered in Turkey alone.In Germany, 16 Syrian refugees from Turkey landed in the central city of Hannover on Monday to be resettled and 16 more were expected on a flight later in the day.
Lesbos has been named by the Orthodox church as the destination for the church leaders, and Joanna Kakissis, reporting for NPR from Athens, says it’s a logical destination: it’s where hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees arrived past year, and where many of those now facing deportation are located.
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“Of course there will be more returns, but that hinges on a legal process which we follow to the letter”, the official told Reuters. Refugees are also protesting, saying that the deportation is a “dirty deal”. “No, we didn’t, but they did”, Erdogan said of European Union countries.
