The government of the island of Cyprus announced on Saturday that it will stop examining the asylum requests of migrants from Syria because it can no longer manage the incoming flows. Cyprus is an island located less than one hundred kilometers from the coast of Türkiye. It has long welcomed thousands of asylum seekers, with numbers constantly increasing: in 2019 it was the European Union country that welcomed the most asylum seekers in relation to its population, and since the beginning of this year they have already arrived 2140 people, almost 0.2% of the state’s population: for comparison, in Italy in 2024 there are arrive 16 thousand people, less than 0.03%.
The Cyprus government said it had decided to suspend the examination of asylum requests while waiting for the European Union to define some areas of Syria as “safe”, in order to allow the repatriation of migrants. Defining those areas as safe means declaring them free from wars and armed conflicts, in a country, Syria, where a civil war has been underway for thirteen years now. Today Syria is a country deeply in crisis and divided into areas that are practically worlds apart, with varying degrees of instability and violence.
The redefinition of some areas of Syria as “safe” is a request that Cyprus has been doing for months, again due to its difficulties in managing the flows of arriving migrants. Furthermore, a few days ago, the president of Cyprus Nikos Christodoulides went to Lebanon to ask the local authorities to stop migrants departing from their coasts and heading to Cyprus.
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