Turkey 'coerces,' halts registration for Syrian asylum seekers: HRW

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Turkey has effectively stopped registering new Syrian asylum seekers, said an international human rights watchdog, and the result is "unlawful deportations, coerced returns to Syria," and silence from the European Union (EU).

"The European Commission has recently praised Turkey’s asylum system," charged a report released on Monday by Human Rights Watch (HRW), but "have stayed publicly silent on the suspension and other refugee abuses committed by Turkey, suggesting their primary concern is to halt the movement of asylum seekers and migrants from Turkey to the EU."

“But forcing Syrians who manage to get past Turkey’s border guards to live in legal limbo only risks driving them underground and onward" to Europe, read the report.

Between early 2011 and the end of May 2018, Turkey had registered almost 3.6 million Syrians, making it the world’s largest refugee-hosting country, HRW acknowledges, but adds that, by international law, a country still "may not coerce people into returning to places where they face harm by denying them legal status or access to essential services."

Over the past three years, Turkey has sealed off its border with Syria, while Turkish border guards "continue to carry out mass summary pushbacks and to kill and injure Syrians as they try to cross."

The suspension is claimed to be underway in Istanbul and nine additional provinces near the Syrian border: Adana, Gaziantep, Hatay, Kahramanmaraş, Kilis, Mardin, Mersin, Osmaniye, and Şanlıurfa.

 Restrictions imposed by Turkish authorities, says HRW, are also severely restricting humanitarian aid groups from assisting refugees.

"Aid agencies said they cannot proactively identify unregistered Syrian refugees. At best, they can only react if they are made aware of unregistered Syrians who are seeking help, or if they come across them by chance. They said they sometimes raise the most vulnerable of such cases with the authorities in the hope that they will allow those in urgent need to register."

One group working near the border told HRW, “It’s very simple, we can’t just reach out to registered or unregistered Syrians. We need approval for everything and we’d never get approval to help unregistered Syrians.”

Another agency worker said: “We have repeatedly asked the authorities for permission to do protection outreach work, but we’ve been refused every time.”

The report continued, "Turkey does not allow any independent monitoring of whether unregistered Syrians signing up for return are in fact returning voluntarily or whether they are effectively being coerced."

“Unregistered Syrians in Turkey may be conveniently out of sight, but they shouldn’t be out of mind.”