Turkey cannot play dominoes with refugees on the frontier with Greece
By Alper Ali Riza
State encouragement of irregular movement of refugees by Turkey to her neighbour Greece treats both the neighbour and the refugees as a means to an end, which is wrong and which should be retracted now that there is a ceasefire in Syria. It is just not fair on the islanders in the Aegean and should be condemned emphatically by fellow islanders in Cyprus – be they Greek or Turkish – in a show of solidarity and empathy.
Time was when Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmed Davutoglu professed Turkey’s foreign policy to be zero problems with neighbours. Turkey has few friends among her neighbours now. Time was too when Ataturk’s policy of ‘peace at home and peace in the world’ was the golden principle of Turkish foreign policy.
But the irregular movement of people by the cynical use of refugee status also needs to be called out. It undermines refugee protection and is destabilising liberal democracies across the whole world.
There is a lot of misunderstanding about the nature of the protection states have undertaken to provide refugees that needs to be re-evaluated in light of the experience of refugee protection since 1951.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees refugee law is based on the humanitarian principle that ‘a person becomes a refugee within the meaning of the 1951 Convention as soon as he fulfils the criteria contained in the refugee definition. Recognition of his refugee status does not therefore make him a refugee but declares him to be one.’
This enables refugee claimants to be afforded rights at a time when it is not known whether they are genuine or not that lends itself to considerable abuse by people traffickers.
There are, of course, classic instances when it is obvious that refugees are fleeing persecution. Both communities in Cyprus know this from their own experience of fleeing their homes and communities in 1974, and from witnessing genuine refugees forced to leave Syria in fear of their lives since 2011.
In the late 1980s a top English judge held that the test whether a refugee is genuine is subjective-objective: subjective fear of persecution but for good reason looked at the moment the refugee decides to flee. This was glossed over afterwards but in terms of evaluating the genuineness of a refugee claim it is the best test.
It is the fleeing to the border of another country in fear of persecution that raises an obligation under international humanitarian law to provide protection.
There is no obligation for countries to grant refugee status if the refugee is not actually fleeing persecution. The obligation under the1951 Refugee Convention is not to send refugees back to the frontiers of the country from which they escaped in fear of persecution – normally the country of their nationality.
So, Greece is on terra firma in international law in returning refugees who have not arrived directly from countries that persecute them. Her obligation to examine such cases is not based on international law unless there is evidence that Turkey would send refugees back to Syria, and there is no such evidence. If Greece has obligations, they probably derive from EU law, which is why the EU reached an agreement with Turkey to control the inflow of refugees in the first place.
There are complicated provisions under EU law to determine the EU country with responsibility to examine refugee cases but they do not form part of international law under the 1951 Refugee Convention – always the starting point of any discussion on the obligations of states to refugees.
As originally conceived, there was a time limit on who could claim refugee status: only those who had become refugees as a result of events in Europe before 1951 were eligible for protection, and states were given a choice whether to accept refugees from beyond Europe.
The reason was that the events before 1951 were well known so the objective requirements for establishing refugee status did not need proof – Jewish people did not need to prove that their fear of persecution from the Nazis was well founded.
The time limit on events before 1951 was removed by a protocol in 1967. Events in the world moved on after decolonisation and after the UN became less Eurocentric. However, the right of states to choose whether to accept refugees from beyond Europe was preserved.
Turkey signed the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol but she chose only to offer protection to refugees coming from Europe because historically she had always been prepared to welcome Turkish-speaking Muslims from the Balkans.
Kemal Ataturk’s mother herself was a refugee from Thessaloniki – Salonika – after the Ottomans were defeated in the first Balkan war in 1912, and she and his sister left for Istanbul where many Ottoman Turks from the Balkans took refuge.
It is interesting to notice in passing that Salonika also had a substantial Jewish population that had been given asylum by the Ottoman Empire after they were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. They stayed on when the Ottomans fled in 1912, only to be wiped out by the Nazis during World War II.
So, although Turkey is at present hosting more than three million Syrian refugees, she is doing so exceptionally on humanitarian grounds outside her obligations under the Refugee Convention, which were geared to admitting Turkish-speaking Muslims from the Balkans wishing to resettle in Turkey rather than Arab Muslims from Syria.
But the fact that another million refugees are knocking on her door in north of Idlib, to the east, does not mean Turkey can play dominoes with refugees on the frontier with Greece in the west. It is no way to treat a neighbour.
There are swings and roundabouts to Turkey’s geopolitical location. The advantages are many and well known.
The downside at present is that it has a border with Syria and Iraq and Iran, all of which generate refugees in need of protection. The best way of dealing with migratory pressures from refugees moving to Turkey is to go back to Ataturk’s golden principle of ‘peace at home and peace in the world.’
The ceasefire agreed in Moscow last Thursday is a good first step and the policy should be to preserve peace at all costs – like Ataturk said.
Alper Ali Riza is a queen’s counsel in the UK and a part time judge
