介绍:
土耳其公民或将免签游欧洲
ZJN: The European Commission will back visa free travel for Turkish citizens inside Europe’s passport-free Schengen area.
BK: What makes visa liberalization so important for both the EU and Turkey?
GB: Well, in the short term it’s all about getting Turkey to agree to its plan of taking back people who don’t qualify for asylum and are currently in Greece. On an exchange deal, they would be able be all the same people who qualify for asylum, who are Syrian nationals, on to the EU for settlement there, but Turkey’s not going to hear a barrow of that, despite an offer of six billion Euros to assist, unless it gets this condition of visa-free travel. Now, it’s not benefit for people coming from Europe, but the way things are in Turkey at the moment, the benefit really in the short medium term is largely for Turkey, and it taps into a larger story with Turkey for decades working to become an applicant member of the EU, and being rebuffed repeatedly, so it’s a matter of pride, as well as practical economic assistance for Turkey that they will be given indeed a fair access, and it is the dealmaker or the deal-breaker when it comes to this thing to return people from Greece to Turkey.
BK: There are both humanitarian and legal concerns over this scheme, in particular over the safe third country clause that is necessary for repatriating refugees, but for migrants who are rejected to stay in the EU, and are sent back to Turkey, what may happen to them, and how well would their well-being be taken care of by Turkish authorities?
GB: That’s a very important question, perhaps the most important question at the moment. Presuming that Europe can find of processing these people and determine that they don’t meet asylum requirements and had their right to appeal met with, and they’re returned to Turkey, presumably that would mean that they would be sent back to their countries of origin, because they wouldn’t be regarded as genuine refugees, but in the meantime they’d be stuck in Turkey. Turkey is dealing with around three million refugees already. It’s economy has been declining these last couple of years, and there’s also very serious questions about the decline of human rights in general and rule of law in Turkey, so it’s never easy for somebody being in a refugee camp. The Turks have been remarkably generous in catering such a large number of people, but for those who have been sent back from Europe to Turkey, there’s real reasons to be concern they could find themselves in a certain way kind of an indefinite detention without any clear way forward.
ZCG: The deal comes with strings attached by the EU. The EU says that Turkey must still meet EU criteria, such as freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial, and the revising of terrorism legislation to better protect minority rights. Are you optimistic that Turkey can meet these goals in the near future?
GB: In an absolute sense, no – it depends really, frankly, how low the barrier is dropped. So Turkey has to meet basic human rights accords. At the moment, freedom of the press has declined to an all-time low in Turkey, there are eighteen hundred people that have been charged under kind of a strange law about insulting the president, there are major press organizations by the government, there’s really no free press at the moment, political opposition leaders have been arrested on charges of being terrorists or whatever – Turkey does have real problems with terrorism to be fair, but there’s just a deterioration. Turkey, which had been the great hope of the Muslim world in terms of democratic transition has slid back and lost most of the gains it’s made over the last fifteen years, so, realistically there’s no way it can meet the standard that the EU is requiring, so if they are seen to have met the standard, it means that basically, that they’ve dropped the standard to a very, very low level.
BK: Well then, what would you say are the prospects then, for the future? When do you think Turkey really might make its way towards progress on a lot of these fronts?
GB: Look, Turkish politics, more than at most times in its history, this is a country where it has strongman individuals have always played an important role, but more than most times in its history, the personal role played by former prime minister-now-president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan seems to be the pivotal point in all these discussions. He’s exercising extraordinary personal authority that on paper he doesn’t have. When at some point, as happens to everyone, he passes from the scene, you get the sense that his own party, the AK Party, AK Parti, would very much like to reverse some of the moves he’s instigated, and that things might begin to return to normal, but it really depends on one individual.
