Nearly two weeks after the dramatic fall of Bashar al-Assad and his family’s half-century of brutal rule in Syria, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen went to Turkey and Jordan to throw the EU’s hat into a complicated geopolitical ring.
Ostensibly, she wanted to lend her support to a peaceful transition of power that the “Syrian people deserve,” she said. Yet the trip was more than one of mere goodwill.
Syrians are one of the largest groups of people to come to the EU in recent years, seeking refuge from their homeland’s decade-plus civil war. Fighting there has killed well over 300,000 civilians since 2011, according to United Nations estimates, as Syria became a complicated battlefield involving global powers, regional players and non-state factions.
As a result, nearly five million Syrians are registered as refugees in their neighbouring countries. In the EU, they have remained a top nationality requesting asylum. Much of the country’s population has been forced to flee in one way or another.
The EU is a long way from its open stance about a decade ago, led by Germany, when more than one million Syrians arrived seeking protection. Even before Assad fell, the EU was looking for ways to start sending them back, as part of a hardening line on migration that threatens to upend humanitarian norms.
One of the first steps several EU member states, including Germany, Austria, Belgium, Greece, Italy, Sweden and Denmark, took following Assad’s overthrow was to pause asylum applications from Syria. Austria’s conservative-led government said they would offer Syrian refugees a “return bonus” of €1,000.
These efforts are voluntary for now, as the European Commission has acknowledged that “conditions are not met for safe, voluntary, dignified returns to Syria.”
Syria’s uncertainty
Over the summer, when Assad’s Russian-backed grip on power still looked unshakeable, the EU mulled a shift in its dealings with the dictator. Years of sanctions and isolation would have been balanced with more engagement, including a special envoy for Syrian matters.
“The EU has been quite absent when tackling the violations of the regime or supporting change in Syria,” Catherine Woollard, director of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, told The Parliament. “The credibility of EU foreign policy is not helped when there’s an obsession with returning refugees or controlling migration.”
UNHCR has asked countries to refrain from taking steps to send Syrians back. Even if governments heed that request, Syrians themselves may not. The UN refugee agency estimates that some one million Syrians may try to go home on their own during the first six months of 2025. That includes those in neighbouring Turkey, which hosts more than half of the global Syrian refugee population, in part because of a €6 billion deal it has with the EU that keeps them there.
What’s next for Syria is anyone’s guess, which makes any effort to deem it “safe” questionable.
The newly announced transitional government is led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, the head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is widely considered a terrorist organisation. Al-Sharaa has worked to improve his and his group’s image, foremost by renouncing links to al-Qaeda.
“At this juncture, it is difficult to tell whether this distancing is genuine or a public relations effort,” Rebecca Lucas, a senior analyst at RAND Europe, told The Parliament.
The fall of the Assad regime was an awkward moment for EU leaders, who were quick to applaud the end of a “criminal regime” that just a few months earlier they debated giving some recognition to.
With the dictatorship gone, one moral quandary has gone with it, but others persist. Assad was not the only actor in the civil war nor the only catalyst of the refugee exodus. Since various armed groups remain and sectarian tensions are high, refugee advocates are wary of EU members making a pre-mature call that would put asylum seekers back in harm’s way.
“It’s really incumbent on EU member states to ensure that return only takes place when it is durable and when safety can be guaranteed,” Woollard said.
Deportation: easier said than done
Despite the quick move to freeze asylum, member states remain bound by EU asylum law. That means there are limits to how sweeping their measures can be to curtail asylum or deport those already here.
“At the end of the day, all of these decisions in EU member states to repatriate are individual decisions that can then be contested in the national courts, possibly even in the European Court of Human Rights,” Hans-Jakob Schindler, the senior director of the counter-extremism project at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, told The Parliament.
Another obstacle to deportation plans: Sending people back means having someone on the other side to receive them. Given Syria’s unpredictable political situation, the EU may have trouble finding a willing partner to play that role.
“At the moment there is not an existing government, so structurally it is impossible,” Schindler said. “Who exactly is going to sign that on the Syrian side?”
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Publish date : 2024-12-20 08:17:00
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