RPT - REVIEW - Europe's Unwelcome Guests: Terrorists Whom Nobody Wants Straight Out Of Turkey

BRUSSELS (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 14th November, 2019) EU member states are reluctant to welcome back citizens who once wished to join the Islamic State terrorist group (IS, ISIS, banned in Russia) in Syria and Iraq, stripping them of their passports and leaving them with either a single nationality or completely stateless.

On November 11, Turkey started deporting some 2,500 captive IS members to their countries of origin, a decision that risked diplomatic fallout with its European allies. Turkish Deputy Interior Minister and spokesman Ismail Catakli said that the first group of deported fighters included three German, two Irish, 11 French, and three Danish nationals.

Apart from the jihadists detained on Syrian soil, there were 813 confirmed terrorists at 12 deportation centers in Turkey itself. With regard to these numbers, Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu bluntly said that his country was "not a hotel for foreign jihadists" and that they would all be returned to their homelands, regardless of their citizenship situation.

TO LET OR NOT LET IN? EU TO DECIDE

Several countries, including the United Kingdom, have stripped IS fighters of their citizenship, precisely to prevent their return. This has made many legally stateless.

France, in turn, is a firm believer that former fighters should be judged and sentenced in the countries where war crimes were committed. French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian has even tried to have jihadists judged in Iraq, as well as persuade Iraqi judges to not issue the death penalty, which European countries abolished decades ago.

Several militants have already returned to Germany, which was warned about this development only at the last minute.

"For years, the IS and the jihadist militias seeped into Syria across the Turkish borders. Turkey is co-responsible for the emergence of ISIS. The Turkish military offensive also allowed a mass escape in Syria of captured IS fighters; Turkey created that problem and now wants to shift the issue of the jihadists to Europe and Germany," member of the German parliament Gottfried Curio told Sputnik.

The lawmaker added that the German government should work on inviting Syria to the negotiating table with the goal of stabilizing the situation in the region as well as defining its position and diplomatic interests.

"Now, it is Erdogan who defines German policies, with only weak protests by the German government behind the scene," Curio said.

Belgium also believes that IS fighters, as well as their wives and other family members, should have been stripped of their citizenship right away.

"Belgium, like the other European member states, whose recent 'nationals' left to fight in the ranks of ISIS, has hesitated and has not been clear about the status of these terrorists, their wives and children. They should have been stripped of their nationality immediately. But we see that it would not have been enough. Turkey wants to send them back anyway and threatens Europe with the re-opening of the Turkish borders, to let migrants flood Europe again. So now, we'll have to take them back, because of our refusal to face realities," Aldo Carcaci, a retired Belgian lawmaker, told Sputnik.

PROBLEMATIC EUROPEAN CONVENTION ON NATIONALITIES

Nineteen years ago, the Council of Europe agreed on a convention forbidding signatory countries from revoking their own nationals' citizenship if they did not have a second one. The idea was to avoid creating stateless people.

Some European countries have signed the document, but many others have neither signed nor ratified it � such as the United Kingdom � or just not ratified it, like France. These countries are therefore free to strip any citizen of their nationality.

"France has the means to refuse the return of any of these terrorists, wives and children. They can strip ... the citizenship, without any problem, of any person who has committed terrorist acts because we have not ratified the European Convention on Nationality. Russia has not ratified it either, for example, neither has the UK. What is missing is the political will in France," Thierry Mariani, a European Parliament member from France's National Rally party, told Sputnik.

The politician added that the men and women who have chosen war over peaceful lives in their home countries should never come back, and that France and its European neighbors should not tolerate any such returns.