En Son Haber (link in Turkish) – The Turkish coast guard is now using planes to spot refugees boats and prevent them from departing towards Greece. A Turkish coast guard plane identified a refugee boat on the shores of Dikili, a city close to Izmir and subsequently informed the Dikili gendarmery. The gendarmery stopped the 37 Syrian refugees before departing and took them to the gendarmery station.

Hurriyet Daily News – A seven-year-old Syrian child has died after being turned away from four hospitals in the southern Turkish province of Antalya due to his lack of a valid ID.

“My son was suffering from high fever. We went desperately from hospital to hospital but no one accepted us because we didn’t have an ID,” he said. After the four rejections, Ahmed stopped looking for a hospital and took his son back to their house. He told Doğan News Agency that he found his son dead after he woke up at around 5 a.m. one morning.

Ahmed said he would be filing complaints against the hospitals that rejected his son.

Bordermonitoring Bulgaria – Yesterday, the Bulgarian border police found the corpse of a woman near the village of Ravadinovo in southeastern Bulgaria. A group of 31 migrants from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia, which was detained one day before, said to the authorities they had to leave the woman, because she was too weak to go on. Two other members of the group, 14-and 16-year old girls, were brought to hospital because of frostbite.

This is the first human being who was killed by the European border system in Bulgaria, in 2017. Bordermonitoring Bulgaria (BMB) argues that the new installed European Border and Coast Guard Agency, which came into force on October the 6th 2016 at Bulgaria’s Kapitan Andreevo Border Checkpoint, cannot stop incidents like this. Therefore, it is tremendously important to create legal passages to prevent these kind of tragedies.

Al Monitor (article from Nov 30) – Mohammed Zaghnoun, a refugee from Aleppo, arrived in Turkey two years ago and considers himself relatively fortunate. He earns 1,500 Turkish liras ($436) a month, 200 liras ($58) above the minimum wage, in a furniture factory in Ankara. Many of the 3 million Syrians in Turkey don’t even have a job. But Zaghnoun works 12 hours a day, five and a half days a week — one-and-a-half times as long as the legal working week. The Turk working next to him, doing the same job, earns 47% more and receives health insurance. In short, Zaghnoun is horrendously exploited.

Asked if anything could be done to stop the exploitation of Syrians, Carmikli said, “Society doesn’t see it as exploitation. Nobody says to the employers ‘What are you doing to these people? You’re exploiting them.’ No, instead they’re saying, ‘It’s good that you’re hiring them. You’re helping them out.’ It’s a totally different mindset that we’re facing here.”

KaosGL.org (text only in Turkish) – A Syrian trans-gender refugee woman has been murdered in her apartment in Istanbul. The association ‘Istanbul LGBTI and Woman Solidarity Foundation’ is now trying to arrange the funeral. In her statement, Kıvılcım Arat from Istanbul LGBTI emphasized that it was both an anti-immigrant and transphobic attack.

On Saturday, December 17, a person pretending to be a customer stabbed the sexworker Werde to death, with several stabs to her belly. The police which is investigating the crime scene could not identify the attacker from the video recordings. Werde’s friends went to the Forensic Medicine Institute on Sunday December 18 but they were denied to carry out the funeral. Her friends said that Werde’s body was unrecognizable.

World Bulletin – Five refugees drowned off Turkey’s Aegean Sea coast after their boat sank, Turkish official said on Tuesday. Speaking to Anadolu Agency, Namik Kemal Nazli, the governor of the Ayvalik district of Balikesir province in western Turkey, said eight people were rescued out of the 13 on the boat when it sank near Maden Island. “Four children and a woman died and eight others were rescued. There is three-year-old child among the rescued,” he said.

Of the 4,715 migrants and refugees who lost their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean, 429 migrants died in the Eastern Mediterranean route between Turkey and Greece, according to the latest report.

Asylum Information Database (AIDA) – The European Commission published today its Fourth Report on the implementation of the EU-Turkey statement, which aims to take drastic measures to ensure an increase in the number of returns from Greece to Turkey. Since the statement, 748 people are reported to have returned to Turkey, compared to 20,638 arrivals in Greece since April 2016.

A Joint Action Plan of the EU Coordinator on the implementation of certain provisions of the EU-Turkey Statement outlines several legal and operational modifications to the asylum procedure with a view to stripping away some of the crucial guarantees available to persons entering the Greek islands since 20 March 2016.

taz (link in German only) – According to the European Commission, the EU already spend a total of 677 million Euro on the migration-agreement with Turkey. The money does not go to the Turkish government but does towards certain projects directly, e.g. projects offering a better supplying or for the foundation of schools for Syrian children.

By now, 1.216 persons have been returned to Turkey from the Greek islands, said the EU-Diplomat.

Balkan Insight (article from November 11) – While the Sofia authorities insist that seven men deported to Turkey in October never sought asylum in Bulgaria, their families claim the opposite and vow to seek justice in Strasbourg.

“The Bulgarian government gave my brother to a dictator and our family is deeply worried about his security and life,” the brother of one of seven Turkish citizens that Bulgaria deported to Turkey says, referring to Turksh President Recep Erdogan.

He and other relatives of the deportees say the men were sent back to Turkey despite a direct risk of persecution there as alleged supporters of US-based cleric Fetullah Gulen who the authorities in Ankara accuse of masterminding a failed coup in July.

Pro Asyl (link in German) – Turkey already sealed the border to Syria with a wall. Time and time again, refugees report that they were shot at at the border. European politicians remain silent though – no wonder. After all, the EU closed the flight route through the again and is trying to get rid of their humanitarian responsibility by paying millions to Turkey.

Now, those who seek safety do not die in the Aegean anymore but already at the Turkish-Syrian border. Even more far away from Europe: “Out of sight, out of mind” – just as the European politicians wanted it.