Denmark stands firm on returning refugees to Syria
EU adopts new strategy to plug a gap in migration policy by sending back irregular migrants to their countries
Despite mounting pressure from lawmakers and civil society organisations, Denmark is determined to push ahead with efforts to return refugees to war-torn Syria as it claims conditions in parts of the country have improved.
“Denmark has been open and honest from day one. We have made it clear to the Syrian refugees that their residence permit is temporary and that the permit can be revoked if the need for protection ceases to exist,” Immigration Minister Matias Tesfaye said on Tuesday.
The EU’S migration commissioner, Sweden’s Ylva Johansson, said she had raised the mater with Copenhagen, where the government assured her it would not force deportations.
“Nobody could be forced to return to Syria,” Johansson told a news conference, expressing doubt that those who cannot be sent back should have their right to work or study revoked. “This is something that concerns me.”
“When the conditions in their home country have improved, former refugees should return to the home country and re-establish their life there,” Tesfaye said.
In a leter addressed to Prime Minister Mete Frederiksen, Eu-lawmakers on Friday expressed regret at Denmark’s efforts to “expel Syrian refugees” and urged Frederiksen to make a “180-degree turnaround” in the country’s asylum policy.
“Deportations to a country at war must never be normal. Denmark should not take a vanguard role here,” said the leter signed by 33 lawmakers from 12 EU countries, including Germany and France.
Sweden and the United Kingdom have also concluded that the general conditions in Syria’s capital region have improved.
But the Danish Refugee Council, an NGO, said Denmark was the only country in Europe to start systematically rescinding Syrian refugees’ residence permits on those grounds.
Meanwhile, the EU is looking to plug a big gap in migration policy by boosting measures to have irregular migrants voluntarily returned to their countries under a strategy adopted on Tuesday.
Controversially, the European Commission’s plan on return and reintegration puts the EU’S border agency Frontex at its heart, despite multiple news reports and NGO allegations of rights abuses by its officers -- the bloc’s first uniformed force.
EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson defended the agency’s role from the cloud that lingers over it.
She told a media conference that, while “shortcomings” had been identified, an inquiry by Frontex’s board had concluded last month “that the agency was not involved in this type of activity.”
She added that the border agency was “very well placed” to help EU member states to encourage migrants with no right to stay to return to their countries of origin.
Frontex will “grow with these new tasks,” Johansson said, with the aim of “protecting our borders, and our fundamental rights to manage migration, and to make Europe a secure area.”
The commission vice-president tasked with protecting the “European way of life,” Margaritis Schinas, said “we will not accept this Frontex bashing.”
He emphasised that “it’s already part of their job” to oversee migrant returns and “we expect of them to continue doing (so) under European humane and values driven procedures.”
Schinas also admited that, up to now, there has been an EU “failure” to get migrant returns done, noting that in 2019 around half a million people had received orders to leave member states but only 142,000 did so.
“We’re managing roughly the one-third of those who should leave,” he said.
Separately, a boat found driting off the coast of Spain’s Canary Islands with the bodies of 17 migrants on board was towed on Tuesday to one of the archipelago’s islands, officials said.
A Spanish maritime rescue vessel was heading to the area where the boat was spoted on Monday morning some 500km southeast of the island of El Hierro, the office of the central government’s representative on the archipelago said.
It will then tow the migrant boat to the port of Los Cristianos on the island of Tenerife, a journey that is expected to take 48 hours, the office added in a statement.