Slovakia accepts draft of EU-Turkey migration agreement

Slovakia's Government accepts the current draft of a migrant crisis agreement with Turkey, Prime Minister Robert Fico said before the beginning of a two-day EU summit in Brussels on Thursday. "However, no one knows what comes next because motions often emerge at the last minute", said Fico. He referred to the past week's extraordinary EU-Turkey summit, where Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu submitted new requests that European leaders hadn't been notified about in advance. The agreement draft with Ankara contains the return back to Turkey of all new illegal migrants who sailed from Turkey to the Greek islands. Furthermore, as part of existing commitments, the EU is supposed to accept one Syrian from Turkish refugee camps for every Syrian that Turkey takes in from the Greek islands. On the other hand, Ankara demands the speeding up of the visa regime liberalisation with the EU, with visa duty for Turkish citizens to be scrapped by the end of June at the very latest and not October, as originally planned. Turkey also calls for the payment of an already allocated €3 billion to be executed ahead of schedule, with the money earmarked by Turkey for the improvement of living conditions for Syrian refugees on its soil. Ankara also wants the sum to be increased by another €3 billion and to open further accession chapters as soon as possible. The recent Friends of Syria summit raised $10 million to alleviate the crisis. Fico pointed out that, when it comes to resettlement of Syrians from Turkish camps, Slovakia insists on a voluntary migrant resettlement scheme for EU member states rather than a quota system. Also, their numbers shouldn't exceed the already-approved scheme involving 160,000 migrants.