Greece, Turkey take short-cuts:

Europe

Bertaud

Greece and Turkey are rushing through changes to their asylum rules in a race to implement a EU-Turkey agreement on the return of refugees and migrants from Greek islands to Turkey from next Monday, EU officials and diplomats said.

Both Athens and Ankara must amend their legislation to permit the start of a scheme -- denounced by the UN refugee agency and rights groups -- to send back all migrants who crossed to Greece after March 20.

The policy is meant to end the uncontrolled influx of refugees and other migrants in which more than a million people crossed into Europe last year, causing a political backlash and pitting EU countries against each other.

Greece, which started evacuating hundreds of people stranded in Athens’ Piraeus port on Thursday, submitted to parliament an asylum amendment bill on Wednesday. Brussels said it had assurances from Athens that it would be passed this week.

But it does not explicitly designate Turkey as a “safe third country” - a formula to make any mass returns legally sound - and a senior official of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said that change did not remove its concerns about protecting the rights of asylum seekers.

“Our concerns regarding legal safeguards remain unchanged and we hope that the Greek authorities will take them fully into consideration,” UNHCR Europe director Vincent Cochetel said.

The EU executive’s spokeswoman, Natasha Bertaud, was unable to say how exactly rejected asylum seekers would be removed from camps on