Turkey halts migrant re-admission deal with Greece

Turkey suspended its migrant re-admission deal with Greece days after Athens released from prison eight Turkish soldiers who fled their country after a 2016 attempted coup.


The troops were released on Monday after an order extending their custody expired. A decision on their asylum applications is still pending.

"We have a bilateral re-admission agreement, we have suspended that re-admission agreement," Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was quoted as saying by state-run Anadolu news agency on Thursday.

He said a separate migrant deal between the EU and Turkey would continue.

Under the bilateral deal signed in 2001, 1,209 foreign nationals have been deported to Turkey from Greece in the last two years.

Cavusoglu said he believed the Greek government wanted to resolve the issue with the Turkish soldiers, but Greek judges were under pressure from the West.
  [aljazeera.com]
 7/6/18