Evaluation Note / Selim Koru & Omar Kadkoy

It was April 2011 when the first group of Syrians crossed the border into Turkey. The 252 Syrians who moved to the town of Yayladağı, Hatay came from villages adjacent to the Turkish border. They were fleeing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad regime’s brutal suppression of protests that were erupting across the country. In the months and years that followed, hundreds of thousands of Syrians approached the Turkish border, with a majority coming from Northern Syria, and a smaller group from the southern provinces, including big cities like Damascus. Seven years into the war, Turkey is hosting over three million Syrians (see figure one).

It took a few years for the Turkish state to make the necessary legal adjustments. Turkey maintains a geographical limitation to Geneva’s 1951 Refugees Convention, which means it can grant refugee status only to those seeking asylum “due to events unfolding in Europe,” referring to World War II. This is why Syrians were officially called “guests” at the onset. They did not have any legal status, and though they were welcomed by the government, there was no policy framework to oversee them. In April 2013, the Turkish Parliament ratified the Law of Foreigners and International Protection (LFIP), and the Directorate General of Migration Management (DGMM) was established. Syrians could now be granted Temporary Protection (TP) status, which provided them with access to basic public services such as health and education, and, to a lesser extent, access to the labor market.

You may read full paper from here.

“This article was originally published in Turkish Policy Quarterly’s (TPQ) Spring 2017 issue”