Syria has agreed to take back any of its citizens intercepted trying to reach Cyprus by boat, the Mediterranean island nation's deputy minister for migration said Monday.
Nicholas Ioannides says two inflatable boats each carrying 30 Syrians were already turned back in recent days in line with a bilateral agreement that Cyprus and Syria now have in place.
Cypriot navy and police patrol boats intercepted the two craft after they put out a call for help. They were subsequently escorted back to Syria.
Ioannides told private TV station Antenna Monday that there’s been an uptick of boatloads of migrants trying to reach Cyprus from Syria, unlike in recent years when vessels would primarily depart from Lebanon. Cyprus and Lebanon have a long-standing agreement to send back migrants.
He said Cypriot authorities in conjunction with their Syrian counterparts are trying to fight back against people traffickers who are supplying an underground market for laborers.
According to Ioannides, human traffickers apparently cut deals with local employers to bring in Syrian laborers who pick up work right away, despite laws that prevent asylum-seekers from working prior to the completion of a nine-month residency period.
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“The message we’re sending is that the Cyprus Republic won’t tolerate the abuse of the asylum system from people who aren’t eligible for either asylum or international protection and just come here only to work,” Ioannides said.
The bilateral agreement is compounded by the Cypriot government’s decision last week not to automatically grant asylum to Syrian migrants, but to examine their applications individually on merit and according to international and European laws.
From a total of 19,000 pending asylum applications, 13,000 have been filed by Syrian nationals, according to figures quoted by Ioannides. He said most of those applicants are Sunni Muslim and are no longer persecuted as they had been under the government of former President Bashar al-Assad.
Since Assad was toppled in December last year and a new transitional government took power, some 2,300 Syrians have either dropped their asylum claims or rescinded their international protection status, while 2,100 have already departed Cyprus for Syria.
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Both the United Nations refugee agency and Europe’s top human rights body have urged the Cyprus government to stop pushing back migrants trying to reach the island by boat. Cyprus strongly denies it’s committing any pushbacks according to its definition.