Yearly Archives: 2018

News Digest

Where LGBTQ War Refugees Finally Feel Safe

Via Narratively – When you’re queer in the Middle East, escaping war doesn’t mean you’ve escaped the people who want you dead.

“Turkey is now home to around 3.6 million Syrian refugees. In 2015, there were approximately 400 self-identified LGBTQ Syrian refugees in Turkey, according to the Organization for Refugee, Asylum & Migration. The actual number is likely much higher because many are too afraid to speak out. They are accompanied by LGBTQ asylum seekers from Iran, Iraq, and other countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Homosexuality is illegal in many of these countries—even punishable by death in some—but legal in Turkey, making Istanbul a beacon for queer refugees.

“At the bottom of one of Istanbul’s many hills, along a windy road lined with mosques, barber shops and tea gardens, is Istanbul’s only shelter for LGBTQ refugees. Not far from ancient Byzantine walls, Aman LGBT Shelter currently houses 14 LGBTQ refugees, the majority of them from Syria.

Continue reading Where LGBTQ War Refugees Finally Feel Safe →

News Digest

STUCK – They fled for safety, only to live in limbo.

Via Huffington Post – “As the gateway to Europe, Turkey has more migrants cross its border than any other country in the world. Since the Syrian Civil War began in 2011, Turkey has been flooded with millions more refugees. With Turkey’s system overwhelmed, migrants from countries other than Syria have little chance of being resettled anytime soon.”

“This project is about those millions of others — asylum seekers and migrants from places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and throughout Africa — who have fled war and repression, but are often caught in limbo.”

“STUCK follows their journeys through Turkey’s two-tiered immigration process, and reveals the complex system faced by non-Syrians as they try to start new lives.”

Click here to see the whole story at Huffington Post and explore eight individual stories in the project, each on a different aspect of the asylum system in Turkey.

Continue reading STUCK – They fled for safety, only to live in limbo. →

News Digest

Mass Deportations of Afghans from Turkey: Thousands of migrants sent back in a deportation drive

Via Afghanistan Analysts – In a recent television appearance, the Turkish Interior Minister, Suleyman Soylu, said that 15,000 Afghans have been sent back home from Turkey. While it is likely that this number has been exaggerated, there is no doubt that in April and May of 2018, thousands of Afghan migrants were sent back on charter flights from Turkey to Kabul. This is the Turkish government’s response after a 400 per cent increase in arrivals of Afghan migrants to Turkey during the first quarter of 2018. In early April of this year, the first charter flight carrying Afghans back to Kabul flew out of Erzurum, a city in eastern Anatolia that has become the centre of these returns. AAN’s guest author Amy Pitonak visited Erzurum to find out first-hand about the situation for Afghans there.

Aşkale Removal Centre in Erzurum. Photo: Amy Pitonak

Continue reading Mass Deportations of Afghans from Turkey: Thousands of migrants sent back in a deportation drive →

News Digest

Turkey’s Syrian refugees hot-topic issue in upcoming election

Via AlJazeera – As the Turkish economy slows down and people are getting ready to elect new leadership, the presence of millions of Syrian refugees living in the country returns to the fore.

Today marks World Refugee Day, when the plight of migrants is highlighted. More than 16 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes in the last year.

Turkey hosts more refugees than any other country, and the upcoming election has highlighted the issue of more than four million Syrian refugees in the country. They have generally been welcomed, but as the economy slows, they fear they will bear the fallout.

Click here to see the video-report from Gaziantep

News Digest

30,000 Syrians eligible to vote in Turkish elections: PM

Via Hurriyet Daily News – Some 30,000 Syrians are eligible to vote in the June 24 elections in Turkey. Speaking to journalists in the western province of İzmir, Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım announced “around 30,000 Syrians have received Turkish citizenship so far.”

“They have the right to vote but I do not know how many of them will use that right. They are our guests and they will return to their country,” the prime minister said. He stressed that the Syrians in Turkey “must obey the Turkish law.” “If they do not, then we will take them by their hand back to where they came from,” said Yıldırım.

Continue reading 30,000 Syrians eligible to vote in Turkish elections: PM →

News Digest

The L.G.B.T. Refugees in Turkey Who Refuse to Be Forgotten

Riot police crack down on an L.G.B.T. rally in Istanbul, in 2016. Under the provisions of the country’s state of emergency, protest is effectively banned.
Photograph by Ozan Kose / AFP / Getty

Via The New Yorker – When you are a refugee, you learn all about the hierarchy of compassion. There are the people from war-torn countries—refugees from humanitarian catastrophes so enormous that they upend the world’s imagination, such as those who have escaped from Syria. There are people who have fled a sudden campaign of violence and hatred, such as the gay men who have been escaping from Chechnya for the past year. And then there is you: unlucky enough to have suffered the kind of misfortune that can’t seem to hold onto a headline. From the officers of U.N.H.C.R.—the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the agency that runs refugee-resettlement operations around the world—what you hear is this: “There is no country for you.” Continue reading The L.G.B.T. Refugees in Turkey Who Refuse to Be Forgotten →

News Digest

Their Road to Turkey Was Long and Grueling, but the Short Flight Home Was Crueler

About 60 Afghan men were being deported aboard a flight to Kabul from Istanbul last month, including Abdul Mohammed, right. They had spent months on a dangerous journey to Turkey, only to be returned home on a five-hour flight. Credit: Mujib Mashal/The New York Times

 

Via The New York Times – By Mujib Mashal; KABUL, Afghanistan — Their desperate journey out of Afghanistan, en route to safer lives in Europe, had taken months through high mountains and treacherous deserts.

They survived bullets, beatings and insults from border guards. Bandits stripped them of nearly everything except their shoes and clothes — which over the months of the journey they would wash in whatever puddle or pool was available, laying the clothes out in the sun to dry and then wear again.

But their migration halted suddenly in Turkey, and now they were being deported to a home country racked by war. I flew with them on the return flight to Kabul from Istanbul that finally ended their hopes. It took just five hours last month. Continue reading Their Road to Turkey Was Long and Grueling, but the Short Flight Home Was Crueler →

News Digest, Other Resources

Study by the Greens/EFA Group in the European Parliament published

The EU-Turkey Statement and the Greek Hotspots – A Failed European Pilot Project in Refugee Policy

The Greens/EFA Group in the European Parliament recently published a study focusing on the detrimental impact that the EU-Turkey Statement and the implementation of the “hotspot approach” in Greece is having on the rights of refugees and migrants arriving. The study finds that the current procedures and practices for processing asylum applications on the Greek islands under the EU-Turkey statement violate the applicants’ right to asylum and due process.

The study can be downloaded here.

News Digest

European Commission calls for continuing Turkey-Greece migrant deal

Via Middle East Monitor – The European Commission has called for the continuation of the bilateral migrant readmission deal between Turkey and Greece.

“The commission’s position is that it should be continuously implemented in order to meet all remaining benchmarks under the visa liberalisation roadmap with Turkey,” the Commission’s spokesperson Natasha Bertaud told a press briefing Friday.

Her remarks came after Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu announced Thursday that Ankara was suspending its bilateral migrant readmission deal with Greece.

People wait at Athens International Airport as 234 refugees are transferred to Lyon of France within the EU Relocation Programme of International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Athens, Greece on 18 October, 2017 [Ayhan Mehmet/Anadolu Agency] Continue reading European Commission calls for continuing Turkey-Greece migrant deal →

News Digest, Other Resources

New Monthly Report on Rights Violations and Resistance by Legal Centre Lesbos

Asylum Seekers leaving from Lesvos to Athens in early May 2018.

Via Legal Centre Lesbos – In the months since our last update on rights violations and resistance in Lesvos, our advocacy and campaigning resources were almost exclusively focused on the two trials for the Moria 35 and Moria 10 that took place in Chios in late April and early May 2018.

The situation has predictably worsened in Lesvos. Continue reading New Monthly Report on Rights Violations and Resistance by Legal Centre Lesbos →