Roundup: Syrian migrant wins appeal in Greece against deportation to Turkey: lawyer

A 26-year-old Syrian migrant who arrived on the Greek island of Lesvos this spring has just won an appeal against a decision that would lead to his return to Turkey.

One of his lawyers told Xinhua about this complicated process in a recent interview.

The Service Asylum committee examining refugee appeals in Greece on second degree, ruled against sending him back to Turkey, said Stratis Skountianellis, a member of the Legal Service of the Greek Council for the Refugees, a Greek NGO offering pro bono legal aid to refugees.

Refugee rights campaigners claim that the EU-Turkey migration deal has been thrown further into doubt after this decision, potentially creating a precedent for thousands of other similar cases.

The committee states in a document seen by Xinhua that "the temporary protection which could be offered by Turkey to the applicant, as a Syrian citizen, does not offer him rights equivalent to those required by the Geneva convention."

It is the first such decision after the implementation of the March 18 EU-Turkey deal, which repeals the first-grade committee verdict for the Syrian refugee, who is detained in Moria camp of Lesvos.

In a recent interview, Skountianellis told Xinhua his client was a French Literature student at the Aleppo University. His fiancee is also a refugee in Sweden.

On April 6, 2015, he left his homeplace and went up to the border with Turkey. A trafficker showed him a secret passage, he told the committee. He worked in Turkey to raise money to continue his trip to Europe and paid 700 dollars to a smuggler he met in a coffee shop in Izmir to reach Greece.

He was taken to a Turkish beach near Dikili and departed by boat to Lesvos on March 20, 2016. Since then he has been living in Moria Camp.

In front of the committee, the Syrian migrant said he neither want to nor can live in Turkey, citing alleged tensions between some Alawites and Sunni Muslims to which he belongs.

Skountianellis told Xinhua that the first-grade decision which had stated that Turkey is considered a safe third country is proved wrong.

"It had irrationally supposed that crossing Turkey and staying and working there for 10 months just to earn the money you need to continue your journey to Europe, can be considered as a sufficient connection of yours with that country," Skountianellis said.

"It had also ignored so many violent entrance refusals recorded along the Turkish borders, as well as the fact that the Temporary Protection offered by Turkey to Syrian refugees can be freely cancelled at any time, indefinitely postpones the original asylum application's examination, forbids both free unregistered movement all around the country and application for turkish citizenship, and systematically boycotts the refugees' right to legal work," the Greek lawyer underlined.

He said it is quite important that this asylum rejection is cancelled by second-grade ministry committees.

The point of the EU-Turkey agreement is that all "irregular migrants" crossing from Turkey into Greece from March 20 are sent back, and each arrival is individually assessed by the Greek authorities. Nearly 350 refugees and migrants have been returned to Turkey from the Greek islands under the terms of the deal.

The asylum committee on Lesvos has examined 174 requests of Syrian migrants, and 100 of them were accepted. The rest of the asylum seekers have appealed to the second degree committee, according to local authorities.

The effects of the EU- Turkey deal are obvious in dealing with the refugee influx to Lesvos. In January and February 2016, there were 42,601 and 31,416 arrivals respectively, while in March and April, the numbers dropped to 14,155 and 1,766 respectively.

The Camp of Moria and the Camp of Kara-Tepe on Lesvos are now hosting around 3,000 refugees and migrants, according to the local police. Endit