The Cypriot government claims that Turkey systematically forwards asylum seekers to the Mediterranean island’s Turkish Cypriot north so that they can create a new pressure point on the south. Nouris added that 15,000 migrants have had their asylum applications rejected but can’t be deported because there’s no coherent EU policy - or agreement with their home countries - on sending them back.Ĭypriot President Nicos Anastasiades told fellow EU leaders at a Brussels summit on Friday that so far this year the country’s authorities have received 6,800 asylum claims, with 6,250 of those filed by people who crossed over from the north.
Interior Minister Nicos Nouris has told EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson that the country can’t host more asylum seekers “due to the severe burden” on its reception system.Īt an EU Asylum Support Office conference in Malta last week, Nouris said Cyprus is “obliged to take significant and drastic” measures along the buffer zone, adding that about 800 migrants crossed it recently within a 10-day span. And the government has given no indication that it would let them in, for fear that could encourage other migrants from the Middle East and Africa to see the buffer zone as an easy gateway to asylum.Ĭyprus says it has the highest number of first-time asylum applications among all 27 EU members, relative to its population of roughly 1.1 million.
Neither the Cyprus government nor authorities in the breakaway north have directly referred to the case so far. Celebrated Tuskegee Airman Charles McGee dies at 102
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