Tag Archives: Europe

U.N. urges Greece to stop detaining migrant children

Refugee girl with umbrella

By Karolina Tagaris

ATHENS (Reuters) – A top United Nations official urged Greece on Monday to stop detaining refugee and migrant children, some of whom are locked up in police cells for weeks, and to develop child protection services instead.

The U.N. Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, Francois Crepeau, said he had met unaccompanied children held in police stations for more than two weeks without access to the outdoors, and “traumatised and distressed” by the experience.

Others were with their families in overcrowded detention centres, where inter-communal frictions and contradictory information created “an unacceptable level of confusion, frustration, violence and fear”, he said.

“Children should not be detained – period,” said Crepeau, on a fact-finding mission in Greece from May 12 to 16.

“Detention should only be ordered when people present a risk, a danger, a threat to the public and it has to be a documented threat, it cannot simply be a hunch.”

Crepeau said children and families should be offered alternatives to detention. He urged authorities to develop a “substantial and effective” guardianship system for unaccompanied minors and increase the shelter capacity for them.

More than a million migrants, many fleeing the Syrian war, have arrived in Europe through Greece since last year. More than 150,000 have arrived in 2016 so far, 38 percent of them children, according to U.N. refugee agency data.

Greece, in its sixth year of economic crisis, has struggled to cope with the numbers.

International charity Save the Children says an estimated 2,000 unaccompanied children who travelled alone to Europe or lost their families on the way are stranded in Greece and only 477 shelter spaces are available across the country.

(Unaccompanied minors) are put in … protective custody and the only place there is space (for them) is the cell in police stations and that’s where we find them quite often,” Crepeau said.

“Spending 16 days (in a police cell) is way too long. What is needed is specialised body of competent professionals who can take care of unaccompanied minors.”

(Reporting by Karolina Tagaris; editing by Andrew Roche)

German ‘godfathers’ reunite Syrian families

German godfather receives presents

By Joseph Nasr

BERLIN (Reuters) – Three days after an emotional reunion with his younger son in Berlin, a 71-year-old Syrian handed a bar of olive oil and laurel soap, a hand-made wall hanging and a box of pistachio sweets to a 56-year-old German he had never met before.

The gifts were from Aleppo, the city devastated by five years of war which he and his elder son had been able to leave thanks to the German, engineer and father of four, Martin Figur.

Figur is one of the “Godfathers for Refugees”, matched with the family by a non-profit organization of the same name that seeks sponsors to help Syrians already in Germany to bring their relatives here.

“During the war, the Germans – government and people – have shown they are closer friends of the Syrian people than the Arabs,” the Syrian father told Figur at their meeting, which was witnessed by Reuters. He declined to give his name to protect relatives still living in the fiercely contested city.

Tight border controls across Europe, stricter asylum rules, and an EU-Turkey deal to clamp down on migrant sea crossings to Greece have left many Syrians in Germany struggling for ways to help relatives still in their homeland make it to safety.

The arrival of more than a million migrants into Germany last year prompted the German government to tighten asylum rules, including a two-year ban on family reunions for those granted limited refugee status, making the situation worse.Martin Keune, the owner of an advertising agency, founded Godfathers for Refugees last year after two Syrian asylum seekers he was housing begged him to help them bring in their parents.

Keune was inspired by the story of his wife’s Jewish uncle, who survived the Holocaust thanks to a British couple who adopted him while the rest of his family were sent from Berlin to the Nazi death camp in Krakow, Poland, where they perished.

At Berlin’s Schoenefeld airport on Saturday, the Syrian father’s younger son Mohannad, who has been in Germany since 2006, held back tears as he greeted his father and brother.

“You look exhausted, but healthy and you are breathing and that is the most important thing,” he said, pressing his hand on his father’s arm.

DESPERATE

Mohannad, 36, came to Germany ten years ago on a cultural exchange program and had been trying to reunite his family since 2012.

“When I started looking into laws on family reunions, I became desperate,” he said.

His net monthly salary at a Berlin-based charity for refugees is less than the minimum of 2,160 euros ($2,460.24) the authorities say a sponsor must earn to bring in just one family member. That is about the average net salary in Germany.

Since March 2015, the Godfathers’ group has found sponsors for 103 Syrians, two-thirds of whom are already with family members in Berlin. The rest are waiting to receive two-year residency permits at German consulates in Lebanon and Turkey.

The association can only sponsor Syrians who have at least one close family member, such as a spouse, a child, a parent or a sibling, who has been in Germany for at least one year.

It relies on crowd funding and donations from its 2,200 members to raise the 800 euros a month it needs for each Syrian. This covers rent, health insurance, and a 400-euro stipend, equal to what the government pays unemployed Germans.

The godfathers do not fund the Syrian newcomers directly but take on legal liability for their living costs for five years even if in the meantime they apply for asylum and are granted full refugee status.

Figur signed a “Declaration of Commitment” at the Foreigners’ Registration Office in Berlin accepting liability for Mohannad’s father, brother as well his mother, who is still in Aleppo.

Germany took in some 1.1 million migrants last year, and of the more than 470,000 asylum applications filed over that period the largest group were Syrians, making up 35 percent.

The influx has fueled the rise of the anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany (AfD), which entered three state parliaments in elections in March by luring voters angry with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s welcoming approach toward refugees.

“I can only encourage people to make contact with refugees, because only then will their attitudes change,” said Figur, a Catholic, commending Merkel’s courage in the refugee crisis.

A ceasefire in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and its main commercial center before the war, has held since last week, making it easier for father and son to leave by land to Lebanon and on to Germany, a 20-hour journey.

They know they are lucky and hope mother, daughter and grandson – who have stayed behind at the wish of the son-in-law – will be able to join them soon in Berlin.

They described the gifts to Figur as a gesture of gratitude for “helping strangers”.

“Martin Figur helped us even though he did not know us,” said Mohannad’s brother, 38, pointing at his “godfather” with a smile. “And this is what I want to do in the future, help others.”

($1 = 0.8705 euros)

(Editing by Philippa Fletcher)

Militant interest in attacking nuclear sites stirs concern in Europe

Doel Nuclear Plant

By Geert De Clercq and Christoph Steitz

PARIS/FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Meter-thick concrete walls and 1950s-style analog control rooms help protect nuclear plants from bomb attacks and computer hackers, but Islamist militants are turning their attention to the atomic industry’s weak spots, security experts say.

Concerns about nuclear terrorism rose after Belgian media reported that suicide bombers who killed 32 people in Brussels on March 22 originally looked into attacking a nuclear installation before police raids that netted a number of suspected associates forced them to switch targets.

Security experts say that blowing up a nuclear reactor is beyond the skills of militant groups, but that the nuclear industry has some vulnerabilities that could be exploited.

“The insider threat is one of the most difficult to deal with, as this hinges on the ability to screen employees and figure out the nature of their intentions,” said Page Stoutland at the U.S.-based Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), citing recent reported incidents in Belgium.

His assessment reflects growing anxiety among Western governments and regulators, including the U.N. nuclear watchdog (IAEA), about the risk of radicalised individuals gaining access to sensitive energy infrastructure, including nuclear sites.

In 2014, an investigation into a deliberate act of sabotage at Belgium’s Doel 4 nuclear reactor found that a former employee of the plant had died earlier in the year while fighting with Islamist militants in Syria.

In December, Belgian police found a video tracking the movements of a senior nuclear industry official during a search of a flat as part of investigations into the Islamic State attacks in Paris on Nov. 13 that killed 130 people. Security around Belgian nuclear power stations was ramped up as a result.

Industry experts say that deliberately triggering a disastrous meltdown of a nuclear reactor would be difficult as nobody is ever alone in its control room, which typically has four to six operators there at all times.

This, according to Bertrand Barre, a former executive at Areva, the state-owned nuclear reactor manufacturer, would reduce the risk of a suicide mission like the Germanwings disaster last year in which a pilot locked himself in the cockpit and crashed his plane into a mountain.

Deliberate acts of sabotage cannot be ruled out, though. In 2014, the Doel 4 reactor was halted four months after someone purposely damaged its turbine by draining 65,000 liters of oil. The perpetrator was never found.

The risk of cyber attacks is also increasing. Most nuclear plants were built before the Internet or even the computer age, and their control rooms run on 20th-century analog technology. But the NTI says that nuclear plants are now digitalizing quickly, increasing the risk that hackers could commandeer them.

PLUTONIUM SHIPMENTS

The biggest risk arises from the nuclear fuel cycle, which involves the enrichment of uranium, fuel production and recycling, transport and storage of radioactive material.

Specialists say the pools in which spent nuclear fuel is left to cool are more vulnerable than the reactors themselves.

“A scenario which leads to water loss by damage to the pools could lead to a release of radioactivity of the same or higher order than a core meltdown,” said Yves Marignac, director of energy consultant WISE-Paris.

Installations like La Hague in France or Sellafield in Britain – where spent fuel from dozens of reactors is stored in pools before it is reprocessed or put in casks for dry storage – pose a particular worry.

Following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, French authorities deployed ground-to-air missiles in La Hague, though these were removed a few months later after the threat level was deemed to have receded.

Every week, plutonium – one of the two key ingredients in nuclear bombs, along with highly enriched uranium – is transported overland from La Hague to Marcoule in southern France for recycling into mixed-oxide fuel.

“We cannot have a number of identified high-level terrorists on the loose and put emergency legislation in place while at the same time shipping plutonium over public roads on a regular basis,” World Nuclear Industry Status Report lead author Mycle Schneider told Reuters.

France has been under a state of emergency since the Islamic State bombing and shooting rampage in Paris, with increased powers of search and arrest for police.

Areva defends the plutonium shipments, saying they are coordinated with state authorities, have armed escorts and are housed in containers that are “real fortresses” secured by 100 kg (220 pounds) of steel for every kg of plutonium.

DIRTY BOMB

Experts also worry about militants pilfering radioactive material from medical or industrial installations.

Radioactive isotopes are used in dozens of applications, from cancer treatment to pipeline-welding inspections, and thousands of packages with small amounts of radioactive material are shipped across Europe every year.

Stolen radioactive material from these shipments could be combined with traditional explosives to create a “dirty bomb”.

While the radioactivity spread by such a device is unlikely to be lethal, it would create huge panic and pollute a vast area that would be very expensive to decontaminate.

In 1995, Chechen rebels placed a cylinder of radioactive caesium in a Moscow park, but did not detonate it and alerted Russian authorities, who deactivated the device.

Since the mid-1990s, member states of the watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency have reported about 2,800 instances of radioactive material going missing.

IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano said last month only a handful of these incidents involved material that could be used to make a nuclear explosive device, but some of the missing material could go towards devising a dirty bomb.

“The fact there has never been a major terrorist attack involving radioactive material does not mean it could not happen,” Amano said.

(Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Syria sees impasse broken as EU urges engagement in peace talks

GENEVA (Reuters) – The head of Syria’s delegation in Geneva said EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini had urged his government to engage positively in peace talks on Wednesday, and he believed the round of talks had broken the diplomatic impasse.

Mogherini arrived unexpectedly in Geneva on Wednesday, possibly highlighting concerns that talks on Syria risk getting deadlocked unless headway on the matter of political transition is made soon.

“She passed on a letter of support for the Syrian-Syrian dialogue,” Bashar Ja’afari told reporters. “She came to support us to engage positively in the talks that would lead to an end to the Syrian crisis,” he said after the rare meeting with a senior Western official.

Mogherini earlier held talks with the chief coordinator for the opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC), Riad Hijab.

Ja’afari told her he wanted the European Union to reopen its embassies and lift sanctions on Damascus, but said that while his team would return for a second round of talks in Geneva, he had told U.N. mediator Staffan de Mistura they could not come back before Syrian elections on April 13.

Activists and diplomats said de Mistura was finalizing a document for delegates at peace talks that will synthesize common points of convergence, but is likely to stay clear of the divisive issue of political transition.

With a fragile truce in place in Syria, warring sides are more than a week into talks on ending the conflict, but government officials have rejected any discussion on a political transition or the fate of President Bashar al-Assad, who opposition leaders say must go as part of any such plan.

Speaking before the negotiations adjourn on Thursday, Ja’afari said he had received a document from envoy Staffan de Mistura.

“We will respond to it at the beginning of the next round,” he said, declining to take any questions.

The five-year-old conflict between the government and insurgents has killed more than 250,000 people, allowed Islamic State to take control of some eastern areas and caused the world’s worst refugee crisis.

The U.N. envoy said on Tuesday that he aimed to establish if there were any points held in common by the different parties. If successful, he would announce these on Thursday.

Randa Kassis, who heads up a Moscow-backed opposition group, said de Mistura would distribute a document of common points gathered from the various delegates.

Points included creating a future unified Syrian army to fight terrorism or ensuring a democratic and non-sectarian based Syria.

“I don’t think much has happened in this round,” Kassis told Reuters. “We’re waiting for a U.S.-Russian accord to solve the (key) issue once and for all. Until they resolve it this process will drag on.”

Jihad Makdissi, head of the Cairo opposition group, confirmed he was also expecting de Mistura to issue a paper on a potential “common vision” for Syria that he believed was on the right path.

“It covers many points important to the Riyadh platform, the Cairo platform, and the Moscow platforms,” he said, referring to the different opposition groups.

A Western diplomat said he believed de Mistura’s new document was an attempt to synthesize views he had heard from his various interlocutors during the round of talks.

The cessation of hostilities deal, engineered by Washington and Moscow three weeks ago, but not signed by any of the warring parties, remains fragile.

Asaad al-Zoubi, head of the HNC’s delegation, said on Tuesday it was “obvious” there were no points of convergence with the Syrian government and accused it of renewing sieges and barrel bombing campaigns against civilians.

Mogherini’s visit coincides with high-level meetings in Moscow between Russian and U.S. officials.

They aim to give fresh impetus to the talks and assess how Russia envisages a political transition in Syria, in particular the fate of Assad.

(Additional reporting By John Irish and Stephanie Nebehay; Writing by John Irish; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky/Ruth Pitchford)

UNHCR takes swipe at EU-Turkey migrant deal

GENEVA/LESBOS (Reuters) – The United Nations refugee agency dealt a blow to EU efforts to stem the biggest humanitarian crisis in generations on Tuesday, saying it would no longer assist in the transfer of migrants and refugees arriving in Greece to “detention centers”.

The European Union reached a deal with Turkey just four days ago aimed at halting the flow of migrants across the sea to Greece, but the UNHCR said the deal was being prematurely implemented without the required safeguards in place.

It said migrants were being held against their will at reception facilities in Greece, and it would not transport people there from the beaches. It will continue to provide other services including counseling to refugees, it said.

The accord crafted by EU leaders and Turkey specifically mentions the UNHCR’s involvement, although UN officials in Geneva said they were not consulted on that.

The deal, which took effect on Sunday, is aimed at putting new arrivals in Greece who seek asylum on a fast-track for processing. But it also means those migrants and refugees are kept in detention until their claims are assessed.

“Under the new provisions, these so-called hotspots have now become detention centers,” said the UNHCR’s Melissa Fleming.

“Accordingly, and in line with UNHCR policy of opposing mandatory detention, we have suspended some of our activities at all closed centers on the island.”

Those considered ineligible for asylum are to be sent back to Turkey from April 4. For every Syrian returned, another still in Turkey will be resettled directly in Europe, effectively penalizing those who have in many cases spent their life savings trying to flee conflict.

At least two EU officials said they hoped this shock therapy might work in ebbing the flow of migrants and refugees into Europe. One EU official said “ugly images” of forced detentions and deportations were something the EU would have to accept if it was to regain control of its own borders.

“Ethically we might have doubts. But legally we have no doubts,” another EU official said. Both made the remarks before the UNHCR said it was partially withdrawing its support.

DETENTION CENTERS

Until Sunday, arrivals to Lesbos had been free to leave the Moria migrant camp and head for ferries to the Greek mainland from where they would mostly head north via the Balkans in a bid to reach western Europe, particularly Germany.

Now, they are meant to be held in Moria or one of four other centers set up on the Aegean islands of Samos, Chios, Leros and Kos, pending the outcome of their asylum applications.

As of Sunday, just two buses were available to transport the arrivals to Moria, one belonging to the coast guard and one to the police, a senior port police official said.

Early on Tuesday, 129 refugees and migrants who had been rescued at sea by a coast guard patrol boat and taken to the port waited for some 40 minutes for the buses to arrive.

They sat on the dock shivering, men dressed in thin trousers and jackets and women wrapped up with scarves. Many were barefoot and soaked to their knees.

One, a young man named Zalmai, said he had left Afghanistan with his five-member family.

“(There are) a lot of problems in our country. We’re coming for a better life,” he said, putting on a jumper given to him by volunteers and wrapping a thick grey blanket around his waist.

Using his finger to imitate a knife across his throat, he said: “I’m not going back to Turkey, to Afghanistan. Please, I’ll stay here.”

CHILDREN NEED PROTECTION, UN SAYS

More than 147,000 people, many fleeing conflict in the Middle East and Asia, have arrived in Greece by sea this year, 59 percent of them women and children, according to UNHCR.

On Monday, Turkish monitors arrived on Lesbos to help put the deal into practice. On Tuesday, the Czech Republic offered 10 asylum experts and 30 police officers plus humanitarian aid to Greece, its state secretary for EU affairs said.

Under a timetable agreed with the EU last week, a task force of 4,000 people from asylum case workers and experts to arbitrators, interpreters and security staff should be in place by March 28. Of those, 2,300 should be deployed by other EU states.

A spokeswoman for the U.N. children’s fund UNICEF told a briefing in Geneva on Tuesday the fund was concerned about this new agreement and the implications for children.

“We see no mention of children despite the fact that children make up 40 percent of those currently stranded in Greece,” she said, adding 19,000 children are stranded in Greece and about 10 percent are unaccompanied.

(Additional reporting by Jan Lopatka in Prague and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Editing by Hugh Lawson)

Italy’s bank troubles test European Central Bank’s mettle

MILAN (Reuters) – The European Central Bank is trying to strongarm Italian banks into cleaning up their balance sheets, a year and a half after they fared the worst of all euro zone lenders in its first stress tests as overarching supervisor.

The banks have made scant progress on requested reforms, threatening to undermine a fragile recovery in the bloc’s third largest economy. They argue the ECB’s demands are unrealistic and delay the very consolidation the sector needs.

The standoff poses one of the biggest challenges to Europe’s central bank since it became the euro zone single banking regulator in November 2014. After Greek banks, Italian ones are now taking up most of its time.

Banks like Carige and Monte dei Paschi di Siena have their liquidity monitored daily and the ECB, working in teams with Italy’s central bank, is firing off missives telling lenders to raise capital, find a buyer and sell off bad loans.

“They phone, they e-mail and they come down to see us,” said a source at one Italian bank, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue.

“They are a constant presence. For one reason or the other there is always an inspection – I’d say they are here two months out of three.”

Letters to Veneto Banca and Banca Popolare di Vicenza, which must raise a combined 2.75 billion euros in cash and list on the market to meet ECB demands, threaten all the measures allowed by the EU banking resolution directive — including the last resort of the ECB removing top executives and taking over management.

A crucial test of the strategy is a much-anticipated merger between Banca Popolare di Milano and Banco Popolare that would be Italy’s first tie-up since the ECB took on supervision.

RENZI WEIGHS IN

The boards of BPM and Banco Popolare are meeting this week and sources close to the matter say Banco Popolare is considering a cash call of up to 1 billion euros as part of measures sought by the ECB to clear the merger.

Any deal would still need the blessing of both banks’ shareholders, including powerful unions who fear a tie-up will lead to job cuts.

Bankers close to the talks say the ECB’s conditions for approving the combination have been so stringent that after months of negotiations, the two banks considered abandoning the deal, which would create Italy’s third biggest bank.

“If this merger falls through, the ECB will have to take responsibility for this,” said a frustrated adviser for one of the banks. “It’s like the doctor killing the patient.”

Danielle Nouy, the ECB’s bank supervisory chief, said on Tuesday the merged bank had to be strong from the start.

“We are working very hard with our Italian colleagues to make sure that we put the adequate requirements, no more than is needed but no less, either,” she told the European parliament.

The ECB is demanding a leaner structure and a business plan for the new group within a month: the original deal outline included a 19-member board, two headquarters, no cash call and Popolare di Milano keeping its autonomy and a separate board for six years.

Prime Minister Matteo Renzi — who last year rammed through a decree intended to encourage banking mergers — weighed in on Friday to put pressure on the lenders to reach an agreement.

A sell-off in Italian banking stocks – some have lost more than half their value so far this year – and a flight of deposits from banks seen as more vulnerable, means the government feels time is running out.

“2016 is the year when Italy must sort out its banking problems once and for all,” Renzi said.

ECB’S CREDIBILITY DRIVE

Analysts say the ECB, which is headed by former Bank of Italy chief Mario Draghi, wants to establish itself as a credible institution, ensuring Europe’s banking industry is on a sound footing and taking laggards to task.

“The regulator is being extra cautious and particularly severe and active when it comes to Italy but the situation warrants it,” said Andrea Resti, an adviser to the European Parliament on banking supervision.

After a three-year recession, Italy’s banks are saddled with 360 billion euros ($405 billion) of bad loans – one third of the European total and equivalent to one fifth of Italy’s output.

Banks are reluctant to sell soured debts quickly, fearing that would blow a hole in their accounts and force them to raise cash in rough markets.

One reason for the sector’s fragility is the fragmented financial industry with 650 banks, most of which are tiny lenders with patronage ties to local communities. “It’s not that banks in other countries don’t have problems, but in Italy it’s more widespread, because you have lots of small banks that do not have the shock absorption capacity you find in bigger banks,” said Nicolas Veron, a financial services expert at think-tank Bruegel in Brussels. “A third of the banks that failed the ECB tests were Italian, but since then not much has happened.”

BAD MEMORIES

The unresolved problems of Italy’s banking sector also serve as a reminder of the scars left by the euro zone debt crisis.

The banks’ large holdings of government bonds plummeted in value as the cost of servicing Italy’s debt, the world’s fourth largest, soared at the height of the crisis.

Rome said then it did not need a Spanish-style, EU-funded bailout for its banks, but only the ECB’s pledge to save the euro and its cheap long-term loans halted the vicious circle of sovereign risks sinking the country’s lenders.

Now the government’s hands are tied, because under tougher European rules that came into force this year any rescue of weaker banks would wipe out shareholders and impose losses on creditors and perhaps even large depositors.

Italians got a bitter foretaste of the new regime when the government salvaged four tiny banks in November and 12,000 retail bond holders lost their savings.

Bankers under the microscope say ECB supervisors have uneasy relations with the Bank of Italy, which also declined to comment for this article.

“There is an atmosphere of mistrust and they think Italian banks have been let off the hook for too long by the national regulator,” said a senior investment banker involved in the merger negotiations between the two cooperative banks.

“The ECB is really giving us a hard time.”

(additional reporting by Paola Arosio in Milan, Stefano Bernabei in Rome and Francesco Canepa in Frankfurt; editing by Philippa Fletcher)

Greece asks EU partners for help to make migrant deal work

LESBOS, Greece (Reuters) – Greece asked its European partners on Monday for help implementing a deal with Turkey meant to stem an influx of migrants into Europe, as hundreds more – many unaware of the new rules – streamed from their boats onto Greek islands.

For months the epicenter of Europe’s biggest migrant crisis since World War Two, Greece is struggling to effect the logistics operation needed to process asylum applications from hundreds of migrants still arriving daily along its shoreline.

Turkish officials arrived on the island of Lesbos on Monday to help put the deal into practice. Anyone who arrived after March 20 must be held until their papers are processed and those deemed ineligible are to be sent back to Turkey from April 4.

Late on Monday, a first group of 150 migrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh were transferred – handcuffed and under police escort – from the island’s registration center to a passenger ferry that would take them to the mainland by early morning.

They had arrived on Lesbos on Sunday and would be taken to immigration offices in Athens, a police spokesman said.

Under the EU-Turkey roadmap agreed last Friday, a plan must be made by March 25 and some 4,000 personnel – more than half from other European Union member states – deployed to the islands by next week.

“We must move very swiftly and in a coordinated manner over the next few days to get the best possible result,” Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said after meeting EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos in Athens.

“Assistance in human resources must come quickly.”

Avramopoulos said France, Germany and the Netherlands had already pledged logistics and personnel.

“We are at a crucial turning point … The management of the refugee crisis for Europe as a whole hinges on the progress and success of this agreement,” he said.

However, on Monday, the day after the formal start of an agreement intended to close off the main route through which a million refugees and migrants arrived in Europe last year, authorities said 1,662 people had arrived on Greek islands by 7 a.m. (0500 GMT), twice the official count of the day before.

REFUGEES UNDETERRED

Just after 4:30 a.m. on Monday, one coastguard vessel rescued 54 refugees and migrants from the open sea and brought them to the port, some of the 698 arrivals counted in Lesbos.

They staggered down the ramp, women and children first, one elderly man bundled up in blankets.

“Where are we going?” asked one Syrian woman who was traveling with her husband and daughter.

The group were directed to a coastguard bus that would drive them to the Moria “hot spot”, a center where new arrivals are being registered and their asylum applications processed.

“We are very tired. I want to go to my family in Sweden,” said Ahmet Bayraktar, a 32-year-old unemployed accountant from Aleppo, Syria. “We’ll try, God willing.”

Like others, he was unaware of the new EU-Turkey accord.

“We don’t know about this,” Bayraktar said. “We’re coming directly from Syria. Everybody wants to go to the border. We don’t have the news, we don’t have electricity, we don’t have anything.”

Two hours later, just as the sun rose above the Aegean Sea, the same coastguard vessel pulled another 44 people from the water. One woman cradled a baby just a few months old.

They walked silently to the bus for Moria, a sprawling, gated complex of prefabricated containers and tents.

“IT’S BETTER THAN SYRIA”

Before Friday’s deal, migrants and refugees had been free to wander out of the camp and head to ferries to the Greek mainland, from where they would mostly head north through the Balkans towards wealthier western Europe, especially Germany.

Now, new arrivals are supposed to be held in centers pending the outcome of their asylum applications.

Under the deal, for every Syrian returned to Turkey, another would be resettled from Turkey within the European Union, a process which has already triggered alarm from human rights groups for being discriminatory, a violation of international law and one which could be challenged in court.

Some diplomats believe the accord could unravel within months because neither side looks able to deliver on its commitments, but that the need to get the migration crisis under control is so urgent that it was felt best to clinch a deal now and deal with shortcomings later.

The fate of the nearly 47,000 migrants, stranded in Greece when countries along the Balkan route shut their borders a few weeks ago, remains unclear.

Hundreds of migrants traveling from the islands to the Greek mainland disembarked on Monday at the port of Pireaus near Athens. They appeared free to leave because they had landed in Greece before Sunday, witnesses said.

Some migrants said they would try to reach Idomeni, a northern Greek frontier outpost where some 12,000 refugees and migrants remain stranded, hoping that Macedonia will reopen the border and let them pass through.

“I will try to go to the border with Macedonia within the next 10 days even if it’s closed. Maybe I will have to come back here, maybe not, but anyway it’s better than Syria,” said Hozefa Hasdibo, 23, from Idlib in Syria.

(Additional reporting by Lefteris Karagiannopoulos and Renee Maltezou; Editing by Louise Ireland)

Shaky EU-Turkey migrant deal faces tough reality checks

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – A deal between the European Union and Turkey meant to curb the flow of migrants into Europe in return for financial and political rewards could unravel within months because neither side looks able to deliver on its commitments.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and European Council President Donald Tusk wore relieved smiles on Friday as they sealed a pact for Ankara to take back all migrants and refugees who cross to Greece in exchange for more money, faster visa-free travel for Turks and slightly accelerated EU membership talks.

But for Turkey to halt the flow of migrants to Europe will require a major redeployment of its security apparatus to shut down a lucrative people-smuggling business at a time when President Tayyip Erdogan has more pressing priorities.

With impeccable timing, Turkish authorities announced they had detained 3,000 would-be migrants on Friday, but Greek officials say Ankara has done little to stop the flow since November, when the EU and Turkey made a first deal.

Yet Erdogan is more focused on extending his presidential powers, fighting Kurdish militants and preventing spillover from Syria’s civil war.

For Greece to be able to process and send back those migrants who continue to reach its islands would require a transformation of its threadbare asylum and justice systems with scant resources and uncertain EU assistance. The European Court of Human rights considers Athens’ system so poor that it ruled that sending migrants back there from other European countries was inhumane.

Yet the new arrangements are supposed to start from Sunday, with the first returns set for April 4. One EU diplomat said that was like expecting Greece to turn itself into the Netherlands over a weekend.

For the EU to resettle, as promised, thousands of legal Syrian refugees directly from Turkey – one for each Syrian returned from the Greek islands – will require most member states to take in more refugees than they have been willing to share out so far. In the current climate of anti-immigration populism in many countries, that may be a tall order.

The joint statement did not spell out who would return potentially unwilling migrants from Greece to Turkey, a task that may fall to the EU’s Frontex border agency under the critical gaze of the media and humanitarian groups. Greek officials say they are worried it could turn violent.

Images of Afghans, Iraqis or Syrians being removed against their will could lead to an international outcry.

In a foretaste, rights group Amnesty International posted a harrowing picture of refugees cowering behind barbed wire outside the EU summit center with the slogan “Don’t trade refugees. Stop the deal!”

LOGISTICAL CHALLENGE

Greece already faces a huge logistical challenge with 43,000 migrants bottled up in the economically ravaged country since its northern neighbors shut their borders, and more continuing to arrive daily, albeit at a slower pace.

And all this is before the summer weather and calmer seas that facilitated last year’s mass influx.

For the EU to give Turks visa-free travel by the end of June also requires a leap of faith, since Ankara has so far met fewer than half of the 72 conditions. European officials stress the ball is in Turkey’s court to pass the necessary laws and change its visa regime with other, notably Muslim countries.

The EU managed to sidestep a potential stumbling block over Cyprus by agreeing to limit Turkey’s progress in snail’s pace membership negotiations to one policy area – budget – which Nicosia has not blocked.

That got around a standoff over Ankara’s refusal to open Turkish ports and airports to Cypriot traffic. A late addition to the agreement also reminds Ankara of its commitments to the Turkey-EU customs union under which it should open its ports.

If both sides are lucky, the vexed Cyprus issue may not impinge on the migration deal for months, leaving time for peace talks now under way that may lead to the reunification of the east Mediterranean island after more than 40 years of division.

EU leaders desperate to stop the chaotic migration flow were willing to suspend their disbelief and swallow legal qualms – at least in public – because they had no better alternative.

But they have few illusions.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the deal’s co-architect, said there were bound to be setbacks and big legal challenges but she hoped the deal had “irreversible momentum”.

Tusk, who chaired the summit, said the deal was the best the EU could do for now. “A piece of something is better than a piece of nothing,” he said.

“There are many bits of this deal that clearly don’t add up,” a senior EU official acknowledged. “Much of the details will be left to be worked out at lower level later on.”

The optimistic version, voiced by Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders, is that some “intelligent synchronization” can be found between the Cyprus peace process and Turkey’s migration deal. Critics say that is just EU wishful thinking.

‘NO BETTER PLAN’

Some experts believe Turkish leaders don’t expect the EU to keep its word on visas, refugee resettlement or the membership talks and are planning to turn a predictable failure to domestic political advantage.

“Davutoglu and Erdogan know perfectly well that neither side will deliver,” said Michael Leigh, senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund think-tank and a former director-general of the EU’s enlargement department.

“What Erdogan wants is a constitutional power change … so he will present it at the right moment as a European betrayal and call a vote to get more powers,” Leigh said.

At most, he said, the EU could fulfill the financial part of the bargain if Germany pays the lion’s share of the extra 3 billion euros ($3.4 billion) Ankara was promised to support Syrian refugees in Turkey.

Sidelined by Merkel when she drafted the outline deal with Davutoglu last week, French President Francois Hollande made clear he would hold Turkey to meeting EU visa standards in full.

“Visas can only be liberalized if all the conditions are met and I remind you there are 72 of them,” Hollande told reporters. A French diplomat said Turkey had only fulfilled 10 benchmarks fully so far and another 26 were under way.

EU diplomats are skeptical that Ankara will be able to meet all the required benchmarks in time, but such is the urgent need to get the migration crisis under control that they would rather clinch a deal now and deal with shortcomings later.

“It’s difficult but everyone has an interest in trying to make this work and no one has a better plan,” a senior EU diplomat said.

($1 = 0.8872 euros)

(Writing by Paul Taylor; Editing by Pravin Char)

EU, Turkey seal deal to return migrants, but is it legal?

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Union sealed a controversial deal with Turkey on Friday intended to halt illegal migration flows to Europe in return for financial and political rewards for Ankara.

The accord aims to close the main route by which a million migrants and refugees poured across the Aegean Sea to Greece in the last year before marching north to Germany and Sweden.

But deep doubts remain about whether it is legal or workable, a point acknowledged even by German Chancellor Angela Merkel who has been the key driving force behind the agreement.

“I have no illusions that what we agreed today will be accompanied by further setbacks. There are big legal challenges that we must now overcome,” Merkel said after the 28 EU leaders concluded the deal with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

“But I think we’ve reached an agreement that has an irreversible momentum,” Merkel said, adding it showed that the EU was still capable of taking difficult decisions and managing complex crises.

Under the pact, Ankara would take back all migrants and refugees, including Syrians, who cross to Greece illegally across the sea. In return, the EU would take in thousands of Syrian refugees directly from Turkey and reward it with more money, early visa-free travel and faster progress in EU membership talks.

Migrants who arrive in Greece from Sunday will be subject to being sent back once they have been registered and their individual asylum claim processed. The returns are to begin on April 4, as would resettlement of Syrian refugees in Europe.

While many in Brussels hailed the agreement as a game-changer, Amnesty International decried it as a “historic blow to human rights”, saying Europe was turning its back on refugees.

“Guarantees to scrupulously respect international law are incompatible with the touted return to Turkey of all irregular migrants,” the rights advocacy group said, criticizing Ankara’s track-record on human rights.

“Turkey is not a safe country for refugees and migrants, and any return process predicated on it being so will be flawed, illegal and immoral.”

Turkey’s human rights record has drawn mounting criticism amid a crackdown on Kurdish separatists, arrests of critical journalists and the seizure of its best-selling newspaper.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte sought to reverse the narrative, saying the idea was to discourage illegal and perilous voyages across the Aegean and open legal paths to Europe instead.

“There is nothing humanitarian in letting people, families, children, step on boats, being tempted by cynical smugglers, and risk their lives,” he said.

DOABLE?

The EU would also accelerate disbursement of 3 billion euros already pledged in support for refugees in Turkey and provide a further 3 billion by 2018. It would help Greece set up a task force of some 4,000 staff, including judges, interpreters, border guards and others to manage each case individually.

“All new irregular migrants crossing from Turkey into Greek islands as from 20 March 2016 will be returned to Turkey. This will take place in full accordance with EU and international law, excluding any kind of collective expulsion,” the deal said.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said it would be a Herculean task for Greece to handle the returns and the chairman of the EU leaders’ summits, European Council President Donald Tusk, said the deal was not a silver bullet.

“Reality is more complex,” Tusk said, noting a broader EU strategy to control migration that included keeping the land route from Greece to Germany closed to irregular migrants.

Just as the deal was clinched, Turkey said it had intercepted hundreds of migrants trying to reach the Greek island of Lesbos.

“It’s a historic day today because we reached a very important agreement between Turkey and the EU,” Davutoglu said. “Today we realized that Turkey and EU have the same destiny, the same challenges and the same future.”

Turkey’s four-decade-old dispute with Cyprus had been a key stumbling block. Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades insisted there could be no opening of new “chapters” in Turkey’s EU talks until Ankara de facto recognizes the Cypriot state.

But the issue was sidestepped as EU leaders agreed to open a negotiating chapter that was not one of the five blocked by Nicosia. Anastasiades said he was “fully satisfied” after the sides agreed to swiftly open only chapter 33 on budget policy.

Ankara’s central objective — visa-free travel for Turks to Europe by June — would still depend on Turkey meeting 72 long-standing EU criteria.

Facing a backlash from anti-immigration populists across Europe, the EU is desperate to stem the influx but faced legal obstacles to blanket returns of migrants to Turkey.

EU partners would provide additional manpower and resources to help Athens cope with the new challenge and with a backlog of 43,000 migrants already bottled up on its territory.

While the talks were in progress, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan accused the EU of hypocrisy over migrants, human rights and terrorism, as supporters of the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) set up protest tents near the summit venue.

Erdogan said Europe was “dancing in a minefield” by directly or indirectly supporting terrorist groups.

“At a time when Turkey is hosting three million, those who are unable to find space for a handful of refugees, who in the middle of Europe keep these innocents in shameful conditions, must first look at themselves,” he said in a televised speech.

(Reporting by Renee Maltezou, Robin Emmott, Paul Taylor, Andreas Rinke, Gabriela Baczynska, Julia Fioretti, Jan Strupczewski, Humeyra Pamuk, Alastair Macdonald, Elizabeth Pineau, Tom Koerkemeir in Brussels and Ayla Jean Yackley in Istanbul, Writing by Paul Taylor and Gabriela Baczynska, Editing by Alastair Macdonald and Catherine Evans)

European cities join hands to stay afloat in migrant crisis

BARCELONA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – As hundreds of asylum seekers from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere make the risky journey across the Aegean Sea each day to reach Europe, the Greek island of Lesbos faces the problem of what to do with the discarded dinghies piling up on its shores.

Help may be at hand, thanks to an agreement signed this week between the Lesbos municipality and Barcelona. Environmental technicians from the Spanish city will advise on how to deal with the waste piling up on the island, which lies just a few miles from the Turkish coast.

Under the deal, Barcelona city council will also share environmental and logistical expertise with the southern Italian island of Lampedusa, which has seen a huge influx of migrants crossing from North Africa.

The agreement is just one example of cooperation between city and town halls across Europe to try to cope with the continent’s worst refugee crisis since World War Two.

These efforts are a response to a lack of support from national governments and the European Union, experts told a conference on resilient cities in Barcelona this week.

“The debate is taking place very remotely from the people who are ultimately going to be charged with the responsibility of housing, servicing, supporting and integrating refugees,” said Dan Lewis, head of UN-Habitat’s urban risk reduction unit. “(Cities) don’t have a voice in this.”

Eighty to 90 percent of refugees coming to Europe are likely to settle in cities, and many will stay for years, Lewis said.

Those cities will have to try and create dignified lives for refugees – yet there are limited resources and policy measures to help them deal with migration pressures, he added.

“The question of resources and the distribution of resources hasn’t been resolved at state level yet,” he said. “The only other option is for the cities to generate their own.”

SOLIDARITY

That is why cities are setting up solidarity networks, such as that launched by Barcelona this week. Some are also committing their own financial resources to tackle the crisis.

Barcelona city council said on Tuesday it would triple financial aid for refugees in transit to $340,000, responding to the “humanitarian consequences of the decision by European states to close the Balkans route”.

The one thing Barcelona cannot do for now is take in more refugees, as it is blocked by bureaucracy at national level.

On Wednesday, Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau sent a letter to the Spanish prime minister asking for official permission for the Catalan capital to accept 100 refugees now in Athens.

“Barcelona could be hosting and welcoming some of these people – why couldn’t we have an agreement between two cities to relocate (refugees)?” Colau asked, sitting beside Athens Mayor Giorgos Kaminis.

Colau told the Thomson Reuters Foundation she could not say how many asylum seekers Barcelona could resettle, nor when they might arrive, as Spain struggles to form a new government.

“(Madrid) has not responded to the cities and autonomous communities that have said we want to help and are prepared to help,” she told the conference.

INTEGRATION

Kaminis said the Greek capital – through which some 80 percent of the more than 900,000 refugees to arrive from Turkey since the start of 2015 have passed – is receiving support from the United Nations to house 50,000 people in apartments and camps.

“Many of these people are going to stay in Greece – some for the coming years, and many forever – and we need to be ready for the challenge of integrating them into our society,” he said.

The mayors said it was important to find ways to ease tensions between newcomers and city locals, such as making clear that rules to protect people’s rights apply to all.

Colau called for European countries to allow asylum seekers to work, so they can integrate into society and start a regular life.

A well-considered, inclusive approach to migration would help overcome fears about its potential negative impacts – which are generally unfounded, experts told the Barcelona conference.

Immigration has always helped meet demand for labor and spurred economic and scientific development, innovation and culture, said Josep Roig, head of United Cities and Local Governments, a global network.

“Migration and mobility are often portrayed and perceived as a threat, and a burden for local communities rather than an opportunity and benefit – this is a contradiction of reality,” he said.

(Reporting by Megan Rowling; editing by Ros Russell.)