(Brussels) – Many child asylum seekers in Turkey are not going to school because of arbitrary policies for asylum seekers, Human Rights Watch said today. The Turkish interior ministry should revise the policies for non-Syrian asylum seekers that are preventing these vulnerable children from getting an education, despite their right to it under Turkish and international law.
“Turkish law guarantees all children the right to education, but for many child asylum seekers this is an empty promise,” said Simon Rau, Mercator fellow on children’s rights at Human Rights Watch. “There are feasible steps that Turkey should take to get all children, including asylum seekers, into school.”
In March 2017, Human Rights Watch interviewed the families of 68 Afghan and Iranian children ages 5 to 17, in Denizli, Trabzon, and Gümüşhane, which are among places asylum seekers are assigned, and in Istanbul, which is not. Thousands of Afghans and others have nonetheless moved to Istanbul in search of work, and as a result do not have legal status and are at risk of arrest.
Turkey hosts more refugees and asylum seekers than any other country in the world, including 2.8 million Syrians and about 290,000 people from other countries, mostly Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran. In Turkey, asylum seekers from countries other than Syria are required to live in assigned cities, and are restricted from moving elsewhere even if there are few job opportunities and limited aid where they are assigned. Asylum seekers who stay in their assigned city may face poverty-related barriers to education, with parents unable to meet associated costs or feeling they have little choice but to send their children to work rather than school. Those who move in search of work lose their legal status, without which they cannot enroll their children in school.
There are 42,221 school-aged refugees and asylum-seekers from countries other than Syria in Turkey, according to government statistics, but there is no reliable data on how many of them are enrolled in schools. With donor support, the Turkish government has pledged to enroll all Syrian refugee children by the end of the current school year in June 2017, but no similar promises have been made for other child asylum seekers. School enrollment increased by 50 percent for Syrian children in 2016 over the previous school year.
Turkish asylum law and practice differentiate between European, Syrian, and non-Syrian asylum seekers. Non-Syrians must obtain and maintain legal status by registering every two weeks in their assigned city, cannot change their city on the basis that there is no available work or humanitarian support there, and must obtain permits even to travel temporarily.
Seven children Human Rights Watch interviewed, six of them in Istanbul, could not go to school because they lack legal status in Turkey. Two said they knew a 17-year-old undocumented Afghan boy who was arrested in Istanbul and deported in January.
Sharukh, 18, whose full name is not being used for his protection, as with others interviewed, is from Afghanistan, and has lived for five months in Istanbul’s Zeytinburnu district. His family is not registered as asylum seekers, and none of his five siblings, ages 6 to 14, have been able to enroll in school because they do not have valid documents, he said. “I don’t know how it will ever be possible for them to go to school,” Sharukh said.
Turkey’s Ministry of National Education has instructed schools to allow children to attend classes as guests if they are in the process of obtaining status as asylum seekers. But that doesn’t apply to children without status in cities like Istanbul, where non-Syrians are not permitted to reside.
But even in other cities, some child asylum seekers were not aware that they could enroll or school staff had not told them of this option. And guest students who do not yet have official identity cards do not get school reports that certify they have finished the grade at the end of the school year. Ten children interviewed were in school but had missed four months to a full year of education because they were waiting to obtain legal status, or had been told by school directors when they finally received official identification that they could not enroll so late in the year and would have to wait until the next year.
Some families described arbitrary decisions by school directors or local education ministry officials that kept children out of school. Three Afghan students dropped out after their school director arbitrarily refused to allow them to take a secondary school entrance exam, insisting that they had to enroll in a vocational school.
Poverty also keeps some children out of school by driving them into child labor. Nineteen of the children interviewed, 10 of them in Istanbul, were working or were looking for work. Turkey allows asylum seekers to apply for a work permit – with the support of a sponsoring employer in the city where the asylum seeker is assigned – six months after their initial asylum application. But official requirements are such that in practice there is very little opportunity for asylum seekers to obtain work in the formal job market. For example, the employer must employ at least five Turkish nationals for every foreigner. Staff at Turkish groups that support refugees and asylum seekers said that potential sponsors are reluctant to regularize informal workers because of requirements to pay the minimum wage and social security contributions.
None of the asylum seekers interviewed who had been in Turkey for more than six months had a work permit, because they could not find an employer to sponsor them. A social worker who has worked for two-and-a-half years to support refugees in Istanbul said she had never heard of any non-Syrians obtaining a work permit. The head of a charitable association that supports Afghans living in Trabzon, a city on the Black Sea, said that only about 25 out of 4,200 Afghans in Trabzon have work permits, and that police repeatedly arrest Afghans for working without a permit and threaten to deport them.
The obstacles that parents face to work legally make it difficult to afford to send their children to school. Public school tuition is free, but in three cases, families of children interviewed said they could not afford school-related costs like transportation, stationery, uniforms, and supplies.
Masumah, an 18-year-old from Afghanistan who lives in Denizli, came to Turkey three years ago. She was able to attend secondary school for one year because a Turkish private donor had paid her monthly school transportation fees of 150 Turkish Lira (about US$42), although “at noon I could not afford to buy anything to eat.” She had to drop out two years ago when her benefactor stopped providing support. Masumah’s father, Sarvar, earns 10 to 15 lira ($2.70 to $4.10) a day collecting recyclable materials from trash. The daily minimum wage in Turkey is 59 lira ($16). “We went hungry for three nights, a few nights ago,” Sarvar said. “We did not even have enough money to buy bread.”
Refugee families and children described a lack of Turkish language support. Turkey operates civic centers that provide language instruction for all ages, but asylum seekers must present proof of their lawful status to enroll, and several asylum seekers said they found the classes inadequate and dropped out. Extra Turkish language classes were not available in public schools for any of the children interviewed.
Turkey should ensure that asylum seekers are not assigned to cities without job opportunities or available aid, should provide information about the support available, and should allow asylum seekers to change satellite cities based on financial need. While Turkey has a legitimate interest in managing the residency of asylum seekers in its territory, the Education Ministry should allow children to enroll in schools regardless of their legal status, and enforce its policies by providing a way for families to seek redress for children wrongly excluded, including sanctions for officials who issue arbitrary decisions.
The government should make work permits more accessible by ending the requirement for sponsorship. International donors should ensure that aid to allow children to attend school is available, based on need. Arbitrary barriers for children to take secondary school qualification examinations, such as possessing a passport, should be removed.
“Education gives children and families hope, creates skills and wealth, and improves children’s health, so the benefits for children are matched by the benefits for Turkey,” Rau said. “The choice is between a better future or a gravely uncertain one.”
Asylum, Education for Non-Syrians in Turkey
Turkish law mandates 12 years of free and compulsory education for all children. The Turkish Law on Foreigners and International Protection (LFIP) specifies that child asylum seekers shall have access to both primary and secondary education. But the law also establishes four categories for refugee status. Applicants from European countries are eligible for formal refugee status, Syrians may apply for temporary protection, and other nationalities, including Afghans and Iranians, may apply for “conditional refugee” or “subsidiary protection” status, which provide rights to education, health services, and work if certain requirements are met.
To obtain legal status, non-Syrians must first travel to Ankara to register as asylum seekers. The Interior Ministry’s Directorate General of Migration Management (DGMM) then assigns them to one of the 62 so-called “satellite cities” across the country. The ministry may “close” satellite cities to new asylum seekers. Turkey’s three largest cities – Istanbul, Izmir, and Ankara – are not satellite cities, and as a rule, non-Syrian asylum seekers cannot lawfully live there.
Syrians are not required to live in satellite cities, but they face different obstacles to education, including a backlog in the processing of requests for identification documents required to enroll in public schools. All of the Afghan and Iranian asylum seekers interviewed who are attending public schools are enrolled alongside Turkish students, whereas many Syrian students attend “second shift” classes in the afternoon and evening in which there are no Turkish children.
Turkey has allowed Syrian refugees to establish “temporary education centers” for Syrian children, which teach an Arabic curriculum accredited by the Education Ministry, but is phasing out these schools and has stated that Syrian children must be enrolled in Turkish schools by the end of the 2017-2018 school year.
[Source”pcworld”]
