Turkey forced refugees to return to Syria: Amnesty
Amnesty International (AI) has accused Turkey of having forcibly returned a number of the refugees who reached the country from neighboring violence-wrecked Syria.
In a damning report released on Wednesday, the UK-based rights body said those returned were among scores of refugees who had been collected and forced into detention centers in Turkey since September.
The group said the refugees would, meanwhile, be subjected to abuse at the centers.
Turkey and the European Union held talks in late November, when Ankara agreed to help Brussels stem the flow of refugees into the bloc.
The EU said it would pay Ankara three billion euros (USD 3.3 billion) in order for it to improve the living conditions for the 2.2 million Syrians now living in Turkey so that they are less likely to travel by boat to nearby Greek islands.
Brussels will, in return, also lift the visa requirement for Turkish citizens in the Schengen zone by October 2016.
Amnesty said the mistreatment of the refugees occurred “in parallel” with Turkish-EU talks and warned the bloc that it risks being a “complicit in serious human rights violations.”
More than 920,000 refugees have reached Europe’s shores so far this year while more than 3,600 people have either died or gone missing in their perilous journey to the continent, according to recent figures released by the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
In an interview with China’s Phoenix TV channel earlier this month, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose country’s nationals make up a large portion of the asylum seekers arriving in Europe, blamed the Western support for terror groups as the main reason behind the ongoing refugee crisis.
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