
After 13 years of war and uprisings, the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria has finally collapsed, sweeping the country into a vortex of high hopes and disarming joy as well as new fears.
Overthrown in just 12 days by Syrian rebels led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, al-Assad fled with his family to the Russian Federation, where he was granted political asylum. Inside and outside the country, the collapse of the authoritarian family, who dominated and ravaged Syria for more than half a century, has represented a liberation, and a long-awaited and long fought-for chance to implement a new system offering dignity, freedom, and equality for all.
Nevertheless, the vacuum left by the overthrow of al-Assad brings doubts and anguish due to an unclear and unpredictable future, in which internal fragmentation and the involvement of various external powers risk making Syria an even more erratic battlefield. The next steps will be decisive, and must be delicate in order to ensure that the coming years are not marked by further conflict, instability, and new forms of persecution for the broad mosaic that is the Syrian population. Yet, looking at the fate of the millions of Syrians who have sought sanctuary in the European Union since the start of the country’s civil war in 2011, the EU is already failing at its job.
The very day after the rebels took control of Syria’s capital, several EU Member States suspended the processing of asylum claims of Syrians. Despite various statements and warnings of caution from prominent international organisations, political institutions, and individuals, including UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Michael O’Flaherty, the Council of the European Union, and the European Commissioner for Internal Affairs and Migration Magnus Brunner, at least 17 EU Member States announced that they would pause the processing of asylum applications lodged by Syrians.
These States have invoked Article 31(4) of the Asylum Procedures Directive, which allows Member States to “postpone concluding the examination procedure (…) due to an uncertain situation in the country of origin which is expected to be temporary”, even though there is no guarantee that the transition to peace and improved living conditions will be smooth and swift in today’s Syria.
The measures concern approximately 108,000 pending asylum applications lodged by Syrians all over the EU, meaning that at least 108,000 Syrians are left in legal and personal limbo, not only due to the unpredictable developments occurring in their homeland, but also and especially due to the receiving States that were supposed to represent a stable sanctuary for them.
Since 2019, some 600,000 Syrians have applied for asylum in the EU and, of these, between 80-90% of applications have been successful. These data raise urgent questions about whether EU States act in accordance with international refugee and human rights obligations, even when dealing with recognised refugees from recognised war-torn countries.
This is particularly alarming when looking at the example of the two main EU countries that have hosted Syrian refugees in recent years: Germany and Austria. The first, through its Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, has put a hold on the 47,270 asylum applications from Syrians from the very next day of the collapse of the al-Assad regime, while the latter initially decided to pause its 7,300 asylum applications from Syrians, and has since then even raised the possibility of the immediate return of Syrian refugees to their home country.
Under the fundamental principle of non-refoulement, as well as under the European Convention on Human Rights and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, no person should be sent back to a situation where they face a real risk to their life or a threat of torture or inhuman or degrading treatment. The law on this matter is clear. The 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, which all Member States in the EU have signed and ratified, and in particular its clause on the Cessation of Refugee Status under Article 1C(5) and (6), and the Guidelines issued in 2003 by the UNHCR on the “ceased circumstances” clauses are perfectly clear.
The core of international refugee law is the seeking of durable solutions for refugees—to help them survive and rebuild, and thus find steadiness and certainty despite having to flee their homeland and only known horizon. Cessation should never result in asylum seekers residing in a receiving State with an uncertain status, nor in people being compelled to return to a volatile situation, as this undermines the likelihood of reaching a durable solution and provokes further (or renews) instability in an otherwise hopeful, improving situation.
Another crucial question is whether Syrian refugees will be able to effectively re-avail themselves of the protection of Syria in a manner that is more than mere physical security, but includes a functioning government and administrative structures, a functional system of law and justice, and the existence of adequate infrastructure to enable citizens to exercise their rights and enjoy their freedoms. According to the 1951 Convention, conditions within the refugee’s country of origin must have changed in a profound and enduring manner before cessation can be applied, and this principle should be observed with regard to subsidiary protection under EU law. The mere suspension of new asylum claims and renewals, when insufficiently grounded, as in this case, results in the impairment of the rights of the individual and the interruption of employment as well as social and family ties in the community in which they have settled.
EU foreign ministers at the Foreign Affairs Council pointed out on 16 December that the EU remains the biggest humanitarian aid donor to the Syrian people, but neglected to speak on the issue of international protection for Syrian refugees in Europe, which is currently more important to address.
Syria was already in a state of severe humanitarian crisis because of the impact of years of war, dictatorship, and economic collapse, not to mention the devastating series of earthquakes that occurred last February, the ongoing hunger crisis in the northwest, and regular Turkish airstrikes in the Kurdish-held northeast. The country’s harsh economic, social, and political conditions won’t change in the blink of an eye.
More than 12 million Syrians have been forced from their homes since 2011, leaving over 7.2 million displaced inside the country, while an estimated 4.9 million Syrian refugees live outside of it, mainly in neighbouring countries like Türkiye, Lebanon, and Jordan, but also in Europe. It’s likely that some of these people will now feel that it is safe to return to Syria. Significant and growing return movements have been reported since 7 December; there have been intense traffic jams at Syria’s borders with Türkiye and Lebanon, and some 225,000 internally displaced people have returned to their areas of origin, primarily in the Hama and Aleppo governorates.
EU Member States must ensure that they enable Syrians who wish to return to their homeland the ability to do so in a well-informed and truly voluntary manner. For all those citizens who want to remain in the EU, however, either as recognised refugees or current or future asylum seekers, it is imperative that these States avoid keeping them in indefinite and hostile limbo, guarantee genuine and effective access to asylum procedures, protect them from refoulement, and avoid collective expulsions.
When looking at Syria today, we see mass graves containing the bodies of the hundreds of thousands of people killed by the regime still being uncovered—a reminder that a brutal half-a-century dictatorship leaves profound, abyssal wounds on a country’s people and on its land. We see three countries immediately bombing different areas of Syrian territory as soon as Bashar al-Assad’s flight was confirmed, as if the state of Syria, as well as its territorial integrity and independence, do not exist, and the UN relocating some of its staff outside the country to protect their “teams amid evolving circumstances”.
Türkiye and the Türkiye-backed militias of the Syrian National Army have hit Syria’s northeast to try to wipe out the self-governed Kurdish region of Rojava, the United States has targeted the country’s centre to prevent ISIS from reconstituting and taking advantage of the current vacuum of power, and Israel bombed the south, with Israeli ground forces even documented as overtly crossing into Syrian territory for the first time since 1973 and seizing a swath of southern Syria. Such air strikes and mere crimes of aggressions confirm that the re-establishment of Syrian sovereignty, and the nation’s peace, are still anything but guaranteed.
Michela Pugliese is a Migration and Asylum Researcher at Euro-Med Monitor