Asylum in Turkey - asiel in Turkije blijkt zeer moeilijk te krijgen (interview)
ECRE INTERVIEW: HELSINKI CITIZENS’ ASSEMBLY
ECRE interviews Oktay Durukan from the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly (HCA) in Istanbul, Turkey.
The interview explains what kind of organisation the HCA is and the kind of work they do. In addition, the interview focuses on the situation in Turkey regarding asylum and migration issues
ECRE: Can you tell us about the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly’s (HCA) work in Turkey?
HCA: HCA is an Istanbul-based Turkish human rights organization, working on a wide
diversity of issues. We are an essential part of Turkey’s vibrant human rights community.
Since 2004, protection of refugees and vulnerable migrants in Turkey became one of our
priority areas of activity. We run a relatively extensive, specialised program to provide free
legal counselling and assistance to individuals who want to seek asylum protection in
Turkey. We litigate to intervene in situations involving prolonged arbitrary detention and
risk of refoulement.
We also monitor state policies and practices, write reports on protection gaps. We work
together with domestic and international partners to try to mobilise public awareness and
political solidarity for refugees. We organise trainings for lawyers and other professionals. I
think it’s safe to say that we are the leading rights-based Turkish NGO stakeholder in the
field.
ECRE: We heard there are plans to set up a Refugee Council of Turkey. Can you tell
a little bit more about the plans and expectations for such a council?
HCA: Over the last five years, as migration and asylum became more of a public issue in
Turkey for a variety of reasons, we have seen more and more NGO service providers,
charities and human rights groups become interested to get involved.
At the same time, Turkey’s refugee support and advocacy community as a movement is
still at its early stages, mainly challenged by limitations in organizational capacity and
extremely limited possibilities for funding. Nevertheless, we feel a growing need to
coordinate activities and services, but also to find ways to join forces and get more
effective in our advocacy work.
Partially in response to UNHCR Turkey’s encouragement, we recently launched a
conversation on the possibility of setting up a “Refugee Council of Turkey” as a way to
optimize and enhance our capabilities. We are still at the stage where we are trying to find
a common approach and draw inspiration and ideas from similar “council-type”
organizations across Europe.
ECRE: Who are the asylum seekers present in Turkey?
HCA: Currently there are about 19.000 refugees and asylum seekers registered with
UNHCR in Turkey. About half of them are Iraqis, 25% Iranians, 17% Afghans and 7%
Somalis, to name the largest populations. We have seen a sharp increase in the number
of new asylum applications from ca. 5.000 in 2006 and 8.000 in 2007 to 13.000 in 2008.
This increase is largely due the growing numbers of Iraqis and Afghans who seek
protection in Turkey.
While these are the figures relating to individuals who have actually entered the asylum
system, we are extremely concerned that Turkey’s increasingly aggressive and effective
interception and border control activities result in the denials of a significant number of
refugees from accessing the asylum system.
ECRE: Do you consider Turkey to be “a country producing refugees”? A “receiving
country”? A “transit country”?
HCA: That’s a very good question. In fact, Turkey is all of that, and that is the challenge
we are dealing with. For European publics, Turkey is best known as a “country of origin”
for migrants and refugees. Currently there are about 220.000 Turkish nationals worldwide,
who either have some form of refugee status or waiting for a decision on their asylum
applications. About 10.000 Turkish nationals seek asylum somewhere each year, with
France, Germany and Italy among the leading countries of destination. I think these
figures are a pretty good indication of Turkey’s continuing human rights failures.
At the same time, Turkey is a well-known major “corridor to Europe”, both for individuals
who escape war and persecution and those who are displaced by extreme poverty and
inequalities. Experts estimate the volume of these “mixed flows” over Turkey in hundreds
of thousands each year. In our view, only a portion of the refugees who find their way to
Turkey choose to apply for protection in Turkey or are given an opportunity to do so.
In this context, Turkey’s role as a “receiving country” becomes more and more critical, as it
becomes more and more difficult for refugees to circumvent Europe’s formidable repertoire
of migration control tools and policies, which sadly do not distinguish enough between
those who have a legitimate need for international protection and those who left their
countries for other reasons.
ECRE: What are the main characteristics of the asylum system in Turkey?
HCA: It is complicated. Turkey was one of the negotiators of the 1951 Convention, an
original signatory. But it took advantage of a little-known caveat included in the Convention
to adopt 1951 with a so-called “geographical limitation”, committing itself to provide
protection only to those who were displaced “as a result of events in Europe”. This
“geographical limitation” is still in place.
As a result, it is said that individuals who originate from Council of Europe member states
are welcome to seek and obtain refugee protection in Turkey under the 1951 framework.
However, all the others – i.e. the so-called “non-Europeans”, which are the vast majority of
people who seek asylum in Turkey – are not eligible to stay in Turkey long term as
refugees. Instead, the Turkish Government offers them a very inadequate domestic
protection status referred as “temporary asylum”, which allows them to stay in Turkey until
the UNHCR can find a “durable solution” for them elsewhere. This means that UNHCR is
expected to make an effort to resettle these individuals in third countries, which proves a
challenging task for the agency.
This means that asylum seekers make two “parallel” applications. They apply to Turkish
Government to get “temporary asylum” status. And they have to apply to UNHCR Turkey
to get “refugee” status and resettlement assistance. The two determination procedures are
based on the same eligibility criteria and generally harmonized, but not necessarily always
so, which does occasionally lead to the refoulement of UNHCR-recognized refugees.
Asylum seekers are dispersed around the country in 30 so-called “satellite cities”, where
they spend an average of 2-3 years pending determinations on their asylum request and
resettlement proceedings. They are supposed to find their own accommodation on their
own devices. They get very little assistance in terms of subsistence or healthcare. Legal
employment is hardly a prospect, where many of them are forced into exploitative informal
work arrangements, including sex work. On top of that they are expected to pay a socalled
“residence fee” in order to get a residence permit. Turkey is a tough place to survive
for a “temporary asylum seeker”.
ECRE: Do asylum seekers risk refoulement in Turkey? How and Why?
HCA: They absolutely do. Our observation is that if a newly arrived asylum seeker
manages to find her way to UNHCR and register, generally speaking she will not
encounter problems registering a parallel “temporary asylum” request with the police.
Once she’s in the system, she’ll be relatively safe from being sent back. That is true for
legal entrants as well as irregular arrivals, although we occasionally see UNHCRregistered
- even recognized - refugees fall through the cracks of the highly deficient
Government procedure and find themselves at risk of being refouled.
The story is very different if you arrived irregularly and were intercepted by authorities
upon arrival, in the border region to the east or on your way to the west, or you were
arrested for irregular presence in one of the major cities, or apprehended while attempting
to cross to Greece by land or by sea. If you are caught before you had a chance to
approach the UNHCR and enter the asylum system, the authorities will deny you access
to the asylum procedure. They will simply refuse to process your asylum request.
Following a brief criminal procedure for illegal entry or attempted exit, you will find yourself
locked up for deportation without being given an opportunity to argue your claims to be at
risk of persecution.
In the rare case where you somehow manage to reach a legal assistance-provider and
apply to domestic courts to challenge your deportation, the courts will fail to provide you a
proper remedy. There’s a very good chance you shall be sent back to war or persecution.
In this context, the Strasbourg Court, the ECtHR is currently the only effective remedy
available to us to halt illegal deportations of individuals who express fear of persecution.
ECRE: Can increased training for border control officials be one short-term remedy
to prevent the denials of asylum procedure, which you point out?
HCA: These arbitrary denials do not only mock Turkey’s international law obligations
including those under ECHR, they are also in violation of domestic asylum rules. But this is
not simply a matter of border control officials not doing what they are supposed to do. On
the contrary, our observation based on countless cases that came to our attention, and the
Working together to protect and respect refugees 3
knowledge we acquired over the course of our legal battles in refugee cases, is that this is
a systematic policy instructed and endorsed by Turkey’s Ministry of Interior.
Another issue of serious concern to us in this connection regards the way in which these
illegal deportations are carried out. To give you just one example, last year in April, in a
highly publicised case, 18 Syrian and Iranian nationals, including 5 UNHCR-recognized
refugees, were forced to swim across an unpatrolled stretch of the river that separates
Turkey and Iraq. This is an instance of unilateral, “black” deportation of people to a third
country they have no relation to. 4 of them drowned, including one of the UNHCRrecognized
Iranians. UNHCR condemned the incident in a press release, based on
testimony provided by survivors. To date, there has not been a serious investigation on the
incident.
ECRE: Does, in your view, the EU pre-accession process affect developments in
Turkey in the field of asylum and migration? If so, how?
HCA: The EU accession agenda is the single most important driving force shaping the
direction of Turkey’s policies and practice in the area of asylum and migration. In 2005, the
Government adopted a comprehensive National Action Plan, and pledged to undertake a
series of measures to align asylum & migration policies and practice with EU standards,
including administrative and technical capacity building, training of staff and changes in
legislation. Currently, preparations are underway for a comprehensive asylum law to
replace the existing framework, which is drastically inadequate. At the same time, there
are two ongoing twinning projects for the establishment of six large-scale regional
“Reception Centers for Asylum Seekers” and two more “Removal Centers”, using mainly
European money. On the critical issue of lifting the “geographical limitation”, the
Government emphasises “burden sharing” as a precondition and so far refrains from
making a concrete time frame commitment.
While the EU-accession related reform process presents an opportunity for Turkey to
improve its deficient asylum system and raise standards, we share the serious concerns of
our ECRE partners regarding the direction of EU-level policies in this area, from matters
related to the operation of Frontex, failures of the Dublin System, and widespread and
indiscriminate use of accelerated procedures and administrative detention for asylum
seekers and migrants.
We are also extremely concerned that civil society stakeholders, including the HCA, are
being entirely excluded from the consultations and preparations regarding the ongoing
reform process. In December last year, Turkey’s 10 leading human rights organizations
published a joint open letter to Ministry of Interior to denounce the “black listing” of HCA
and several other critical NGOs from the ongoing supposed “NGO Consultation Meetings”
organized by the Ministry. To date, there has been no change in the situation, and we
continue to be excluded. As a result, the leading rights-based NGO stakeholders in the
field collectively veto the process, until all of us are allowed to participate.
ECRE: We know that the Commission also wants to sign a “readmission
agreement” with Turkey. What is the state of negotiations?
HCA: That is indeed a big issue on the Commission’s agenda. So far, the Turkish
Government has been stalling the negotiations on this one. Our impression is that Turkey
will want to keep this one shelved, along with the “geographical limitation” question, until a
time when they feel confident that EU accession is a realistic political prospect. Currently
as you know, Turkey’s place in Europe remains controversial among the European
political leadership as well as public opinion across the EU.
On a final note, speaking of readmission and the question of migration control generally, I
wish to refer back to my earlier comments regarding Turkey’s extremely worrying
interception practices. It is vital to understand that the EU accession process provides the
context in which we observe Turkey getting more and more effective and aggressive in its
pursuit to stop irregular migration flows to Europe. By that I do not only refer to the “bad
example” effect of what’s going on in Greece, Malta, Italy and so forth. I also refer to the
ways in which Turkey as an accession country is being motivated and geared up to
become a formidable partner in Europe’s so-called “battle against illegal migration”.
Links:
To know more about the situation of asylum seekers and refugees in Turkey, please
consult April 2008 “Unwelcome Guests” report on the detention of refugees in Turkey:
http://www.hyd.org.tr/?pid=610
Bron; http://www.ecre.org/files/ECRE_INTERVIEW_Helsinki_citizens_Assembly_9_October2009.pdf
ECRE interviews Oktay Durukan from the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly (HCA) in Istanbul, Turkey.
The interview explains what kind of organisation the HCA is and the kind of work they do. In addition, the interview focuses on the situation in Turkey regarding asylum and migration issues
ECRE: Can you tell us about the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly’s (HCA) work in Turkey?
HCA: HCA is an Istanbul-based Turkish human rights organization, working on a wide
diversity of issues. We are an essential part of Turkey’s vibrant human rights community.
Since 2004, protection of refugees and vulnerable migrants in Turkey became one of our
priority areas of activity. We run a relatively extensive, specialised program to provide free
legal counselling and assistance to individuals who want to seek asylum protection in
Turkey. We litigate to intervene in situations involving prolonged arbitrary detention and
risk of refoulement.
We also monitor state policies and practices, write reports on protection gaps. We work
together with domestic and international partners to try to mobilise public awareness and
political solidarity for refugees. We organise trainings for lawyers and other professionals. I
think it’s safe to say that we are the leading rights-based Turkish NGO stakeholder in the
field.
ECRE: We heard there are plans to set up a Refugee Council of Turkey. Can you tell
a little bit more about the plans and expectations for such a council?
HCA: Over the last five years, as migration and asylum became more of a public issue in
Turkey for a variety of reasons, we have seen more and more NGO service providers,
charities and human rights groups become interested to get involved.
At the same time, Turkey’s refugee support and advocacy community as a movement is
still at its early stages, mainly challenged by limitations in organizational capacity and
extremely limited possibilities for funding. Nevertheless, we feel a growing need to
coordinate activities and services, but also to find ways to join forces and get more
effective in our advocacy work.
Partially in response to UNHCR Turkey’s encouragement, we recently launched a
conversation on the possibility of setting up a “Refugee Council of Turkey” as a way to
optimize and enhance our capabilities. We are still at the stage where we are trying to find
a common approach and draw inspiration and ideas from similar “council-type”
organizations across Europe.
ECRE: Who are the asylum seekers present in Turkey?
HCA: Currently there are about 19.000 refugees and asylum seekers registered with
UNHCR in Turkey. About half of them are Iraqis, 25% Iranians, 17% Afghans and 7%
Somalis, to name the largest populations. We have seen a sharp increase in the number
of new asylum applications from ca. 5.000 in 2006 and 8.000 in 2007 to 13.000 in 2008.
This increase is largely due the growing numbers of Iraqis and Afghans who seek
protection in Turkey.
While these are the figures relating to individuals who have actually entered the asylum
system, we are extremely concerned that Turkey’s increasingly aggressive and effective
interception and border control activities result in the denials of a significant number of
refugees from accessing the asylum system.
ECRE: Do you consider Turkey to be “a country producing refugees”? A “receiving
country”? A “transit country”?
HCA: That’s a very good question. In fact, Turkey is all of that, and that is the challenge
we are dealing with. For European publics, Turkey is best known as a “country of origin”
for migrants and refugees. Currently there are about 220.000 Turkish nationals worldwide,
who either have some form of refugee status or waiting for a decision on their asylum
applications. About 10.000 Turkish nationals seek asylum somewhere each year, with
France, Germany and Italy among the leading countries of destination. I think these
figures are a pretty good indication of Turkey’s continuing human rights failures.
At the same time, Turkey is a well-known major “corridor to Europe”, both for individuals
who escape war and persecution and those who are displaced by extreme poverty and
inequalities. Experts estimate the volume of these “mixed flows” over Turkey in hundreds
of thousands each year. In our view, only a portion of the refugees who find their way to
Turkey choose to apply for protection in Turkey or are given an opportunity to do so.
In this context, Turkey’s role as a “receiving country” becomes more and more critical, as it
becomes more and more difficult for refugees to circumvent Europe’s formidable repertoire
of migration control tools and policies, which sadly do not distinguish enough between
those who have a legitimate need for international protection and those who left their
countries for other reasons.
ECRE: What are the main characteristics of the asylum system in Turkey?
HCA: It is complicated. Turkey was one of the negotiators of the 1951 Convention, an
original signatory. But it took advantage of a little-known caveat included in the Convention
to adopt 1951 with a so-called “geographical limitation”, committing itself to provide
protection only to those who were displaced “as a result of events in Europe”. This
“geographical limitation” is still in place.
As a result, it is said that individuals who originate from Council of Europe member states
are welcome to seek and obtain refugee protection in Turkey under the 1951 framework.
However, all the others – i.e. the so-called “non-Europeans”, which are the vast majority of
people who seek asylum in Turkey – are not eligible to stay in Turkey long term as
refugees. Instead, the Turkish Government offers them a very inadequate domestic
protection status referred as “temporary asylum”, which allows them to stay in Turkey until
the UNHCR can find a “durable solution” for them elsewhere. This means that UNHCR is
expected to make an effort to resettle these individuals in third countries, which proves a
challenging task for the agency.
This means that asylum seekers make two “parallel” applications. They apply to Turkish
Government to get “temporary asylum” status. And they have to apply to UNHCR Turkey
to get “refugee” status and resettlement assistance. The two determination procedures are
based on the same eligibility criteria and generally harmonized, but not necessarily always
so, which does occasionally lead to the refoulement of UNHCR-recognized refugees.
Asylum seekers are dispersed around the country in 30 so-called “satellite cities”, where
they spend an average of 2-3 years pending determinations on their asylum request and
resettlement proceedings. They are supposed to find their own accommodation on their
own devices. They get very little assistance in terms of subsistence or healthcare. Legal
employment is hardly a prospect, where many of them are forced into exploitative informal
work arrangements, including sex work. On top of that they are expected to pay a socalled
“residence fee” in order to get a residence permit. Turkey is a tough place to survive
for a “temporary asylum seeker”.
ECRE: Do asylum seekers risk refoulement in Turkey? How and Why?
HCA: They absolutely do. Our observation is that if a newly arrived asylum seeker
manages to find her way to UNHCR and register, generally speaking she will not
encounter problems registering a parallel “temporary asylum” request with the police.
Once she’s in the system, she’ll be relatively safe from being sent back. That is true for
legal entrants as well as irregular arrivals, although we occasionally see UNHCRregistered
- even recognized - refugees fall through the cracks of the highly deficient
Government procedure and find themselves at risk of being refouled.
The story is very different if you arrived irregularly and were intercepted by authorities
upon arrival, in the border region to the east or on your way to the west, or you were
arrested for irregular presence in one of the major cities, or apprehended while attempting
to cross to Greece by land or by sea. If you are caught before you had a chance to
approach the UNHCR and enter the asylum system, the authorities will deny you access
to the asylum procedure. They will simply refuse to process your asylum request.
Following a brief criminal procedure for illegal entry or attempted exit, you will find yourself
locked up for deportation without being given an opportunity to argue your claims to be at
risk of persecution.
In the rare case where you somehow manage to reach a legal assistance-provider and
apply to domestic courts to challenge your deportation, the courts will fail to provide you a
proper remedy. There’s a very good chance you shall be sent back to war or persecution.
In this context, the Strasbourg Court, the ECtHR is currently the only effective remedy
available to us to halt illegal deportations of individuals who express fear of persecution.
ECRE: Can increased training for border control officials be one short-term remedy
to prevent the denials of asylum procedure, which you point out?
HCA: These arbitrary denials do not only mock Turkey’s international law obligations
including those under ECHR, they are also in violation of domestic asylum rules. But this is
not simply a matter of border control officials not doing what they are supposed to do. On
the contrary, our observation based on countless cases that came to our attention, and the
Working together to protect and respect refugees 3
knowledge we acquired over the course of our legal battles in refugee cases, is that this is
a systematic policy instructed and endorsed by Turkey’s Ministry of Interior.
Another issue of serious concern to us in this connection regards the way in which these
illegal deportations are carried out. To give you just one example, last year in April, in a
highly publicised case, 18 Syrian and Iranian nationals, including 5 UNHCR-recognized
refugees, were forced to swim across an unpatrolled stretch of the river that separates
Turkey and Iraq. This is an instance of unilateral, “black” deportation of people to a third
country they have no relation to. 4 of them drowned, including one of the UNHCRrecognized
Iranians. UNHCR condemned the incident in a press release, based on
testimony provided by survivors. To date, there has not been a serious investigation on the
incident.
ECRE: Does, in your view, the EU pre-accession process affect developments in
Turkey in the field of asylum and migration? If so, how?
HCA: The EU accession agenda is the single most important driving force shaping the
direction of Turkey’s policies and practice in the area of asylum and migration. In 2005, the
Government adopted a comprehensive National Action Plan, and pledged to undertake a
series of measures to align asylum & migration policies and practice with EU standards,
including administrative and technical capacity building, training of staff and changes in
legislation. Currently, preparations are underway for a comprehensive asylum law to
replace the existing framework, which is drastically inadequate. At the same time, there
are two ongoing twinning projects for the establishment of six large-scale regional
“Reception Centers for Asylum Seekers” and two more “Removal Centers”, using mainly
European money. On the critical issue of lifting the “geographical limitation”, the
Government emphasises “burden sharing” as a precondition and so far refrains from
making a concrete time frame commitment.
While the EU-accession related reform process presents an opportunity for Turkey to
improve its deficient asylum system and raise standards, we share the serious concerns of
our ECRE partners regarding the direction of EU-level policies in this area, from matters
related to the operation of Frontex, failures of the Dublin System, and widespread and
indiscriminate use of accelerated procedures and administrative detention for asylum
seekers and migrants.
We are also extremely concerned that civil society stakeholders, including the HCA, are
being entirely excluded from the consultations and preparations regarding the ongoing
reform process. In December last year, Turkey’s 10 leading human rights organizations
published a joint open letter to Ministry of Interior to denounce the “black listing” of HCA
and several other critical NGOs from the ongoing supposed “NGO Consultation Meetings”
organized by the Ministry. To date, there has been no change in the situation, and we
continue to be excluded. As a result, the leading rights-based NGO stakeholders in the
field collectively veto the process, until all of us are allowed to participate.
ECRE: We know that the Commission also wants to sign a “readmission
agreement” with Turkey. What is the state of negotiations?
HCA: That is indeed a big issue on the Commission’s agenda. So far, the Turkish
Government has been stalling the negotiations on this one. Our impression is that Turkey
will want to keep this one shelved, along with the “geographical limitation” question, until a
time when they feel confident that EU accession is a realistic political prospect. Currently
as you know, Turkey’s place in Europe remains controversial among the European
political leadership as well as public opinion across the EU.
On a final note, speaking of readmission and the question of migration control generally, I
wish to refer back to my earlier comments regarding Turkey’s extremely worrying
interception practices. It is vital to understand that the EU accession process provides the
context in which we observe Turkey getting more and more effective and aggressive in its
pursuit to stop irregular migration flows to Europe. By that I do not only refer to the “bad
example” effect of what’s going on in Greece, Malta, Italy and so forth. I also refer to the
ways in which Turkey as an accession country is being motivated and geared up to
become a formidable partner in Europe’s so-called “battle against illegal migration”.
Links:
To know more about the situation of asylum seekers and refugees in Turkey, please
consult April 2008 “Unwelcome Guests” report on the detention of refugees in Turkey:
http://www.hyd.org.tr/?pid=610
Bron; http://www.ecre.org/files/ECRE_INTERVIEW_Helsinki_citizens_Assembly_9_October2009.pdf
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