From HRW to EU: Don’t Send Syrians Back to Turkey
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The Human Rights Watch (HRW) has reported that many Syrian refugees are being deprived of effective protection and employment and services due to Turkey staying late in recording and implementing temporary protection policies limitedly.
The HRW in its statement today underlined that the European Union (EU) shouldn’t send the Syrian refugees back to Turkey as long as it doesn’t provide sufficient protection and security.
There is no education or health care services
Following expressions took place in the HRW’s statement:
“An agreement, which went into effect in March 2016, between the EU and Turkey provides that many Syrian asylum seekers in Greece could be returned to Turkey without EU evaluation of their original protection claims concerning conditions in their home countries because Turkey is a ‘safe third country’ or ‘first country of asylum’ for them.
“‘Safe’ for the purposes of this analysis means more than being safe from war or persecution. It means that an individual refugee has protected rights in line with the Refugee Convention, including the rights to work, health care, and education.
“The laws and policies governing Syrian refugees’ lives in Turkey, however, do not grant them full refugee rights, and the protections these laws and policies do extend have yet to be fully realized.
“As a result, many Syrians in Turkey still cannot access education, health care, and lawful employment”.
Call on the EU
“Furthermore, delays of up to six months in registration for temporary protection mean that some refugees are unable to get basic services and live in fear of being forced to live in a camp or deported”.
The HRW had earlier called on the EU to admit that Turkey’s respective policies and practical conditions cannot be accepted as “safe” for the refugees to be sent back to.
In the camps and outside…
According to the information HRW provided, over 2.7 million Syrian refugees have been recorded since 2011 in Turkey.
The officials from Turkey indicate that around 300,000 people live in 26 state camps located by the border, and the rest constituting 90% reside in provinces and districts.
Child labor
In January 2016, Turkey issued a new regulation allowing Syrian temporary protection beneficiaries to apply for work permits, but subject to certain residency criteria and only if they can find an employer willing to sponsor them. As a result of the limitations, adult refugees that Human Rights Watch interviewed were either ineligible to apply, lacked information about the policy, or could not find a sponsoring employer.
The HRW had documented how such difficulties lead to risk of poverty and child labor for the Syrian refugees in Turkey.
In April, a UN World Food Programme assessment of 1,562 Syrian households in southeastern Turkey found that 93 percent of those interviewed were living below the national poverty line. The report found that limited access to stable employment was strongly linked to food insecurity.
In November 2015, Human Rights Watch published a report documenting the reasons Syrian refugees have not been able to go to school in Turkey. The government has taken admirable steps to address these gaps and has pledged to enroll 450,000 Syrian children by the end of this year. However, the Education Minister recently acknowledged that “only 325,000 Syrians in Turkey are attending school out of more than 756,000 school-age refugees in Turkey.” The number of school-age children may be even higher, as there are now nearly 940,000 Syrian children aged 5 to 17 registered in Turkey, though some may have left. (YY/TK)