Cyprus is pushing the EU to designate parts of Syria as safe enough to return asylum seekers to the war-torn country.
The island-nation has been preparing to raise the matter formally with Brussels for quite some time given the record amounts of people that arrived to its coasts in 2022.
"Due to its geographical proximity to Syria, Cyprus is exposed to disproportionately large numbers of 'illegal migrants' arriving from the area, which puts pressure on our reception system," Interior Minister Constantinos Ioannou stated when he met with EU Minister for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson on Tuesday. "The time has come to collectively open the discussion for the revaluation of the state of affairs of Syria."
The case for designating regions as safe for returning Syrians is based on a European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) report published last February. It states that regions Damascus and Tartous pose "no real risk for a civilian to be personally affected by indiscriminate violence."
However, it stipulates that people should only be returned to Damascus in "exceptional cases" when they have significant financial means and/or a strong support network at their disposal.
Over five million people have fled Syria since the outbreak of the civil war in 2011. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) says there are 12 million Syrians currently displaced in the region and forecasts that over 750,000 Syrians will need to be resettled in the next 12 months. Johansson told Ioannou that redefining the situation "is not an easy task" and says that "the only way to manage migration in an orderly manner is to do it together."
Response to record numbers
Managing migration is a political priority for Cyprus. It received around 10,600 asylum applications last year (down from 21,500 in 2022), and applicants and international protection holders constitute 5.5% of the population.
The country's response consists in four main objectives: reduce arrivals, upgrade reception facilities, accelerate applications and increase returns. It repatriated more than 11,000 asylum seekers in 2023 – double the amount in 2022 and more than any other EU Member State.
The majority of people fleeing Syria travel to Lebanon and Turkey, but following an EU-Turkey deal in 2016 that closed entry to Greece, arrivals by boat to Cypriot coasts shot up. The number of arrivals in October (1,043) and November (795) were triple that of the previous year.
EU Minister for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson met with Cypriot Interior Minister Constantinos Ioannou on Tuesday. Credit: X
In addition, worries of more arrivals have increased due to the Israel-Hamas conflict and consequent mass movements of people in the Levant – a summer lull in arrivals to Cyprus was broken already.
In this context, Cyprus has ramped up its co-operation with Lebanon by supplying the country with technical assistance to intercept more boats at sea. It urges the EU to do the same and praises the bloc's deals with third-party countries such as Albania, which have have been criticised as unlawful and in breach of human rights in some cases.
