The fence, costing an
estimated €5.5 million, is being built in the Evros region on the Greek-Turkish
border where the vast majority of irregular migrants try to cross into the EU.
It is to be completed in September.
The European Commission on
Tuesday (7 February) said the fence is a national issue. But it also poured
scorn on the project. "Fences and walls are short-term solutions to
measures that do not solve the problem. The EU is not and will not co-finance
this fence ... It is pointless," a spokesman for home affairs commissioner
Cecilia Malmstrom told press in Brussels.
Just one day earlier, Christos
Papoustis, a former European commissioner and currently Greece's minister for
citizen protection had said the fence has both "practical and symbolic
value."
The Greek-Turkish border is
for the most part a 180-kilometre-long river patrolled in part by Frontex, the
EU's Warsaw-based border control agency. Near the city of Orestiada, the river
loops east and runs for about 12 kilometres on the Turkish side, with the
Greek-Turkish land border located in this loop.
In January, some 2,800
migrants tried to cross through the strip, down from around 6,000 a month in
summer. Most people come from Afghanistan, followed by Pakistan and Bangladesh
and most claim asylum or refugee status. Migrants from North Africa are the
second largest group, with Algerians and Moroccans the most numerous.
The perilous journey across
the Mediterranean Sea, which killed almost 1,500 people last year, makes the
Greek-Turkish crossing a more attractive alternative.
But the land border is not
without its fatalities. In mid-January, the corpse of an unidentified Asian man
was found near Orestiada. A week later, a young Palestinian died after being
rescued from an islet in the Evros river. A few days later, an African woman
was found dead on the riverbank. All had apparently died from hypothermia,
Frontex said.
Turkey's visa-free regime with
some countries also makes the border a crossing of choice, Benjamin Ward of
Human Rights Watch told this website from New York - nationals from Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Syria, Jordan, Libya and Iran do not need a visa to enter Turkey.
Ward said the real problem is
not the flow of people but the fact that Greece does not have the capacity to
cope and that EU asylum rules - the so-called Dublin regulation - make matters
worse.
Under EU law, the entry-point
member state is alone responsible for handling a person's asylum case and other
member states must return asylum seekers to the entry-point spot if they find
them.
"The migration problem
can only be resolved by addressing Greece's crisis in its own internal asylum
system and EU agreement to reform the Dublin regulation that puts an unfair
burden on Greece," Ward said.
He noted in his blog the Greek
asylum system is so dysfunctional that in 2010, out of the first 30,000
applications considered, just 11 were approved.
A number of recent decisions
back up his analysis. In January last year the European Court of Human Rights
in Strasbourg urged members not to transfer asylum seekers back to Greece
because they face ill treatment. In November, Germany put transfers to Greece
on hold. In December, the EU court in Luxembourg said people cannot be
transferred to other EU countries where they face "inhuman and degrading
treatment" - the ruling was in the case of an Afghan man who entered
Greece and made his way to the UK.
Meanwhile, NGOs fear that
fencing off the land border will divert refugees - such as families fleeing
violence in Afghanistan and Syria - to more dangerous routes in the western
Balkans or Ukraine.
"It would be a tragedy if
this actually worked as it would prevent refugees from seeking protection and
this would constitute a violation of their human rights," Allen Leas, the
head of the Brussels-based European Council on Refugees and Exiles said
07.02.12
07.02.12
