Cyprus is facing an “extremely challenging” situation with an unprecedented increase of over a 130% in new asylum applicants since last year, said Interior Minister Constantinos Petrides.
Petrides told the 5th Conference of the Red Cross Small European National Societies, that for the third year in a row, Cyprus remains the top receiving Member State per capita of migrants.
He said that in 2017 the annual increase in asylum applications was over 50% while 2018 demonstrated a further sharp rise in migratory flows of 69%.
“The alarming trend continues in 2019, where until July, a total of 7812 new applicants were registered in Cyprus, demonstrating an unprecedented increase of over 130% in comparison to the already high influx of 2018,” said Petrides.
He gave the main reasons for Cyprus being on the frontline as “geographical proximity to politically and socially unstable countries, the inability to effectively control the occupied areas of the island, the lack of cooperation on behalf of Turkey, failure of the EU to manage effectively and holistically the migration issue”.
Syrians top the asylum applications list, but there is a significant influx from Georgia, as well as India, Cameroon, Nigeria and Bangladesh.
“The situation continues to deteriorate, leading to a complete overload of the social and economic structures of the island”.
Petrides said Cyprus strives to provide a “fair and effective” asylum procedure, to ensure applications are processed within a short period of time and that no person will be returned to a country where they face persecution.
“We still have a lot of work to do in improving the asylum system in order to be more effective in granting protection fast to those who really need it, while at the same time, in preventing the increasing abuse of the asylum system from economic migrants.”
He welcomed the placing of an EU expert on the island, according to the agreed action plan with the European Commission and EASO.
The Interior Minister hopes “the new European Commission will present approaches that would achieve the necessary consensus at EU level in order to have a truly European policy and fair burden sharing amongst EU member states”.
Petrides said faced with the enormous challenges of irregular migration, the Red Cross has an extremely important role to play.
The Cyprus Red Cross Society provides humanitarian support to migrants arriving by sea, with the distribution of food and clothes.
