EU funds Turkiye removal centres with over $200m to deport refugees, new investigation finds

The European Union has been funding, with over $200 million, a network of deportation centres throughout Turkiye that have been used to torture and remove Syrian and Afghan refugees from the country, a new investigation has found.

A joint investigation by the outlet, Lighthouse Reports – in collaboration with newspapers El País, Der Spiegel, Politico, Etilaat Roz, SIRAJ, NRC, L’Espresso and Le Monde – has revealed that the EU has provided at least €213 million ($231.5 million) in funding for the construction and maintenance of approximately 30 removal centres in Turkiye.

In a total of almost €1 billion the bloc has provided to Turkiye to help manage the flow of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers across its borders, a quarter of that amount has been used to equip and furnish the removal centres with features such as barbed wire and higher walls. It has also reportedly been used for the purpose of expanding fingerprint systems Turkish authorities have used to track down and arrest the migrants in public areas.

According to the investigative report, the process has seen Syrian and Afghan refugees – the bulk of those who have made their way to Turkiye usually en route to Europe – detained, abused and even killed, in an attempt to make Turkiye serve as a buffer zone to halt the migration influx, despite the EU branding the deportation of those refugees to their home countries as unsafe.

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Having ascertained the figures and funding amount through analysis of extensive official EU and Turkish reports, briefings, research papers and tenders documents, the investigative partners also interviewed over 100 sources, including Turkish, Syrian and Afghan officials and former removal centre staff.

Those sources also included 37 people who had been detained in 22 different EU-funded removal centres, further collecting evidence about the facilities’ poor conditions, systemic violence and the common practice of forcing detainees to sign “voluntary” returns documents. Such findings were additionally supported by visual evidence, court rulings and hundreds of pages of EU documents.

EU branding, logos and identification was notably witnessed by many of the detainees and deportees, and the investigation also reportedly captured images of EU-funded equipment used by Turkish officials to conduct the mass arrests of refugees and transport them back to Syria. Such equipment was then traced in internal EU documents in an attempt to identify their original purpose.

According to the report, the EU is well aware of its active funding of the system, with numerous European diplomats telling the investigation that they raised concerns regarding it but that they were ignored by senior officials. The burying of the issue reportedly goes so deep that such concerns were “systematically erased” from the EU’s annual reports on Turkiye, one unnamed former EU official said. “Everybody knows. People are closing their eyes.”