On 18 March 2016, the EU and Türkiye announced that they had reached an agreement to stop the flow of migrants from the latter to Greece, and by extension to the EU. In exchange of the disbursement of 6 billion EUR and of other advantages, Türkiye committed to readmit asylum seekers whose applications were deemed inadmissible or rejected in the substance. The legal basis for returning inadmissible asylum seekers to Türkiye was identified in the EU safe third country (STC) concept, provided by art. 38 of Directive 2013/32/EU. Almost eight years and hundreds thousands of arrivals later, only a few hundred asylum seekers were returned to Türkiye on the STC ground. The responsibility of the failure of this part of the agreement has been generally identified in Türkiye’s scarce efforts to cooperate with Greece on returns, and in its unilateral suspension of readmissions in March 2020, officially in reason of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Using a relational approach to implementation theories, this paper draws on an extensive fieldwork consisting of 30 in-depth interviews with institutional and non-institutional actors to explore the reason that obstructed the enforcement of returns to Türkiye from the Greek side. It argues that human right obligations, practical constraints, ethical and political norms and the (in)dependence of judiciary scrutiny were key factors in enabling, and mainly obstructing, the implementation of the STC concept in asylum procedures, and the subsequent enforcement of returns of asylum seekers to Türkiye.
