AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL REPORT 2016/17

Organization for Migration estimated that a
record 5,000 people died at sea compared to
around 3,700 last year.
The EU-Turkey deal was the EU’s
signature response to the so-called “refugee
crisis”. Turkey was offered €6 billion to police
its coastline and accept the return of asylumseekers
who made it across to the Greek
islands. The deal was premised on the untrue
assertion that Turkey offered asylum-seekers
all the protections they would be entitled to in
the EU. With a barely functioning asylum
system in place, and nearly three million
Syrian refugees already struggling to get by,
the claim stood testimony to the EU’s
willingness to ignore the rights and livelihoods
of refugees to suit its political purposes.
Even though the numbers of new arrivals
slowed to a few thousand a month on
average, the reception capacity on the Greek
islands was still severely stretched. By the
end of the year, some 12,000 refugees and
asylum-seekers were stranded there in
increasingly overcrowded, insanitary and
dangerous conditions in makeshift centres.
The poor conditions periodically sparked riots
within the camps, while some were attacked
by locals accused of links to far right groups.
Conditions for the around 50,000 refugees
and migrants on the Greek mainland were
only marginally better. By the end of the year,
most had found shelter in official reception
facilities. However, these mostly consisted of
tents and abandoned warehouses and were
unsuitable for accommodation for more than
a few days.
As the year drew to a close, the EU-Turkey
deal remained in place, but looked
increasingly fragile. By then it was clear,
however, that it was only a first line of
defence. The second initiative to stop people
arriving in Europe was the closure of the
Balkan route above Greece in March.
Macedonia and successive Balkan countries
were prevailed upon to close their borders
and assisted in the task by border guards
from different European countries. The move
was initially championed by Hungarian Prime
Minister Viktor Orbán, then taken up by
Austria. For many EU leaders, the misery of
refugees trapped in Greece was clearly a
price worth paying to discourage more from
coming.
The lack of solidarity with refugees and
fellow EU member states was typical of the
migration policies of most EU countries,
which united in their plans to restrict entry
and expedite return. This became apparent
in the failure of the EU’s flagship relocation
scheme. Adopted by EU heads of state in
September, with a view to distributing the
responsibility for receiving the large number
of refugees arriving in a small number of
countries, the plan foresaw the relocation of
120,000 people from Italy, Greece and
Hungary across the EU within two years.
After Hungary rejected the scheme, figuring it
would be better off simply closing its borders
altogether, its quota was reallocated to
Greece and Italy. By the end of the year, only
around 6,000 people had been relocated
from Greece and just under 2,000 from Italy.
The relocation scheme was coupled with
another EU initiative from 2015: the “hotspot
approach”. This EU Commission-inspired
plan foresaw large processing centres in Italy
and Greece to identify and fingerprint new
arrivals, swiftly assess their protection needs
and either process their asylum applications,
relocate them to other EU countries or return
them to their country of origin (or for those
arriving in Greece, to Turkey). With the
relocation component of the plan effectively
falling away, Italy and Greece were left facing
enormous pressure to fingerprint, process
and return as many migrants as possible.
There were incidents of ill-treatment being
used to secure fingerprints, arbitrary
detention of migrants and collective
expulsions. In August, a group of 40 people,
many from Darfur, were returned to Sudan
shortly after a Memorandum of
Understanding was signed by Italian and
Sudanese police. Upon arrival in Sudan, the
migrants were interrogated by the Sudanese
National Intelligence and Security Service, an
agency implicated in serious human rights
violations.
The drive to return as many migrants as
possible increasingly became a key feature of
Amnesty International Report 2016/17 41