The 10th Anniversary of the EU-Turkey Statement: A Decade of Disregard for Human Rights and the Rule of Law

The EU-Turkey Statement, signed on 18 March 2016, is marking its 10th anniversary. The decade that has passed has made it clear that this Statement is not a mechanism that protects the rights of people on the move but rather an externalization policy that turns them into objects of political bargaining, erodes their fundamental rights and pushes the rule of law to the margins.

Ten years of experience have demonstrated just how one-sided, short-sighted and unsustainable a model the Statement truly is. At this point, the Statement has become effectively non-functional; a reality that reveals how migration management has been built on short-term political interests rather than legal safeguards and rights-based principles. In the period that followed, the Statement weakened access to asylum, deepened vulnerabilities and normalized the notion that people seeking protection can be kept away from Europe at any cost.

Presented as a temporary solution, the Statement has over time transformed into a permanent structure that keeps refugees and migrants trapped in uncertainty and precariousness.

Today, Turkey and the Greek islands have become testing grounds for the European Union’s policies of surveillance, deterrence and detention. In both countries, the living conditions of asylum seekers and refugees worsen by the day and what was meant to be temporary has become permanent. More critically, the gap in transparency and accountability created by the Statement has largely prevented the effective monitoring of rights violations occurring on both the Turkish and European Union sides.

Although the return dimension of the EU-Turkey Statement has now effectively ceased to function, it lives on in the “Fortress Europe” logic to which it gave rise and lent legitimacy. In this sense, the true legacy of the EU-Turkey Statement is not a fair and sustainable asylum system, but the institutionalization of an externalization politics that the European Union is actively seeking to export to other countries, along with the erosion of accountability and the reduction of refugees and migrants to political bargaining chips.

As Mülteci-Der, we call upon the European Union and Turkey to abandon policies of containment and deterrence and to adopt a rights-based approach grounded in international protection, genuine responsibility-sharing, safe and legal pathways, transparency and accountability.

Refugees and migrants are people, not political currency.