Ministry of Migration and Asylum’s persistence on Turkey’s characterisation as a “Safe Third Country” for refugees returns to the Council of State

With the more recent decision, published on April 9, 2025, after the outcome of the Court’s deliberation regarding the annulment of the previous JMD had become known, the competent Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Migration and Asylum persisted in the aforementioned designation. According to a press release from the Ministry of Migration and Asylum, the aim is to reject these individuals’ asylum applications as inadmissible, without examining their substance, and to return them to Turkey. This constitutes a clear refusal to comply with the decisions of the Court’s Plenary Session, which were published simultaneously concerning individual cases. These decisions ruled, in accordance with the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union (Case C-134/23) on a preliminary reference from the Council of State, that “insofar as it emerges from the case file that Turkey has generally suspended the readmission of applicants for international protection to its territory since March 2020, the competent Greek authorities […] cannot reject applications for international protection as inadmissible […] on the grounds that Turkey is a safe third country.”

The more recent decision is based on a new proposal from the Commander of the Asylum Service, which selectively incorporates information sources that were cited in the previous proposal deemed inadequate by the Court, now omitting the citation of reports which manifestly cannot support the characterisation of Turkey as a safe third country. The new proposal also fails to take into account critical, reliable, and well-known information sources regarding Turkey’s internal practice in the field of refugee protection and human rights, which contradict the relevant designation. Thus, no consideration is given to condemnatory judgments against Turkey by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), reports by UN bodies, and resolutions of the European Parliament, nor to critical excerpts even from the sources explicitly invoked, such as the annual reports of the European Commission and the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) on Turkey. The above data demonstrate mass deportations of refugees to their countries of origin in violation of the principle of non-refoulement, continuous deterioration of human rights, and structural impediments to accessing Turkey’s asylum procedure, directly disproving its characterisation as a “safe third country.” Furthermore, once again, the relevant proposal contains no reasoning as to why and based on what information the Service recommends Turkey’s designation as a safe third country for citizens of these specific countries of origin.

We believe that this new Ministerial Decision will also be annulled by the Council of State, so as to prevent the risk of a significant number of persons manifestly in need of international protection (prima facie refugees), including families with children and particularly vulnerable individuals, finding themselves in a prolonged state of legal insecurity, without protection and access to basic reception conditions, while in any case, they cannot be removed from our country.

The organisations:

Greek Council for Refugees (GCR)

Refugee Support Aegean (RSA)