Children: The Forgotten Aspect of the EU-Turkey Deal
The recently implemented EU-Turkey deal on refugees—which requires the swift return of most new asylum seekers arriving in Greece from Turkey—has received significant criticism from humanitarian organisations. But the particularly dire impact the controversial deal could have on children—who comprised 40 per cent of the 57,000 arrivals in Greece in February and nearly half of all Syrian asylum seekers—has been largely overlooked.
A new Migration Policy Institute Europe commentary explains how the speedier processing created by the deal alongside greatly overburdened asylum systems in Greece and Turkey could result in children falling through the cracks. While the limited capacity of asylum processing in Greece and Turkey already makes procedural guarantees for adults legally difficult, the more deliberative process outlined under EU and national law to ensure children receive a fair hearing likely will be impossible to safeguard under the deal.
‘The obligation to determine whether a decision is in the “best interests” of the child before making a decision on return is a time- and resource-intensive endeavour that cannot be compressed,’ write authors Hanne Beirens and Paul Clewett, pointing out this is particularly true for unaccompanied minor cases that involve tracing family members across the continent.
The commentary, which follows up on an earlier piece examining broader challenges on implementation of the EU-Turkey deal, concludes with suggestions for how EU Member States can preserve the rights of children seeking asylum. Such an undertaking would require both reforming the legal protection regime as well as strengthening the infrastructure underpinning reception and processing of children in the European Union and Turkey.
KJ