19 June 2015

A new AIDA report on Turkey, the 18th AIDA country, contains detailed information on the country’s two protection systems: the Turkish asylum procedure established by the 2013 Law on Foreigners and International Protection (LFIP) and the temporary protection regime for Syrians, Palestinians and stateless persons formerly living in Syria, established by the 2014 Temporary Protection Regulation and afforded to more than 1,750,000 beneficiaries.

The LFIP has set out a number of procedural and institutional standards for refugee and subsidiary protection status determination, which will be conducted by the Directorate-General for Migration Management. It includes an accelerated procedure for manifestly unfounded claims, subsequent applications or claims lodged in detention, as well as a procedure for inadmissible applications for situations such as where persons come to Turkey from a “safe third country” or have already obtained protection status in another country.

Turkey, which registered over 34,000 applications for international protection in 2014, mainly from Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran, is currently in the process of building six reception and accommodation centres for asylum seekers in Gaziantep, Erzurum, Izmir, Kirklareli, Van and Kayseri. Each centre is foreseen to have a capacity of 750 places, thereby totalling 4,500 reception places for asylum seekers.

Moreover, the report refers to the planned construction of ten additional pre-removal detention centres across the territory of Turkey, which would offer a further capacity of 3,400 places as of 2016-2017, in addition to the 1,740 detention places in the thirteen removal centres currently operating in the country, where asylum seekers may be detained under the LFIP.

 


This article originally appeared in the ECRE Weekly Bulletin of 19 June 2015. You can subscribe to the Weekly Bulletin here.