De facto identity documents (part III): policing a border that is not supposed to be one

Guest post by Bart Klem. Bart Klem is an associate professor at Gothenburg University. As a de facto state, Northern Cyprus has ambiguous boundaries. Purportedly, the so-called Green Line is no border, but it works like one in practice. This yields dubious bordering practices and legal paradoxes. This is Part III of a three-part series on Northern Cyprus. Read Part I here. 

The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) is comparatively easy to reach for migrants. Until recently, it required hardly any pre-travel visa, thus allowing labor migrants and international students to fly in via Turkey and administer their status with customs on Ercan airport.  

Refugees arriving by boat from Turkey, Syria or Lebanon, in contrast, are routinely detained (when caught) and deported to Turkey. Yet, a significant portion of the students and labor migrants arriving in Northern Cyprus by plane come from countries experiencing war and repression and may thus also meet the definition of a refugee in international law. And if they wish to avoid the plight of Rishad and Idris (Part II), crossing to the South is a possibility.  

The ambiguous borders of a de facto state  

The Republic of Cyprus (RoC) considers the North a part of its sovereign territory that was illegally occupied by Turkey from 1974 onwards (see Part I). International courts have endorsed this reading, while simultaneously countenancing the existence of TRNC legal and political institutions. When the RoC joined the European Union in 2004, Northern Cyprus became EU soil (with the Acquis Communautaire suspended) and its inhabitants became EU citizens (provided they were of Cypriot lineage, see Part I).  

The TRNC’s permissive immigration regime therefore effectively creates a landing pad at the gates of the EU’s migration fortress. The UN-monitored buffer zone that divides North from South is notoriously porous and it is not supposed to be a border. Yet, in effect, it is an external EU border. 

As a result, the handling of refugees in the buffer zone is shrouded in legal ambiguity and state neglect. 

Stuck in no man’s land  

This is “Amjad”.  

He is pictured here squatting inside the buffer zone, the supposed no man’s land in which he was stuck for months (see also our recent article).  

Amjad is a Kurdish man originating from Turkey. He grew up with a belligerent police force. His experience with arrests and imprisonments started at a young age, he told me. When the Covid-19 pandemic prompted the bulk release of shorter-sentence prisoners, he was desperate to leave the country but had no passport. However, the TRNC is akin to an external Turkish province, and he could get on a flight to Ercan using his ID card. 

He met a companion with similar plans. Together they waited for nightfall, strolled along the Walled City ramparts alongside the buffer zone, jumped down, and walked the 150-or-so meter across to the RoC checkpoint.  

They presented themselves as asylum-seekers but were told such a claim cannot be made in the buffer zone. Amjad: “they said: ‘the government will not allow you to cross.’ But they told me, ‘if you cut the fence, and you get to the South and apply for refuge, the situation might be different. We may accept you’.”  

But he did not want to break the law and risk deportation. Neither did he want to return to the TRNC, because he worried about being sent back to Turkey. His companion soon disappeared, but Amjad stayed. The UN gave him a tent and he sheltered in an abandoned car park, within sight of the RoC and the TRNC checkpoint. 

Governing the buffer zone through neglect 

The RoC’s rejection of his asylum claim lacks a firm legal basis. Moreover, the buffer zone is RoC territory – at least that is what the RoC itself claims. As a former frontline that has congealed into an entrenched boundary, the buffer zone has a contested legal status. The RoC considers it part of its jurisdiction (it is, after all, Cypriot soil that is not occupied by Turkey), but it shirks the corresponding responsibility towards asylum-seekers. 

While the number of asylum claims in Cyprus is low compared to other Mediterranean hotspots, it is the highest per capita in the EU. Political parties have voiced strong anti-immigrant views and there has been violence, such as the recent bout of migrant mobbing in Limassol. In August 2024, the RoC was accused of taking a group of unwanted immigrants into the buffer zone and refusing them re-entry, resulting in a stand-off with the UN. 

After many months in the buffer zone and several hunger strikes, Amjad was eventually allowed to start his asylum procedure in the RoC. He was taken to Pournara camp, Cyprus’ primary refugee shelter, known for its despicable conditions. At the time of writing, he roams the streets of Nicosia. He is able to stay but not allowed to work or access services. His intermittent whatsapp messages have become no less desperate. 

The dubious political utility of legal ambiguity 

We must careful, Leondros Fischer posits, not to attribute migration dynamics to the peculiar legal-political constellation of the “Cyprus problem”. And to not let policy-makers cite it as a pretext for their own shortcomings. The legal ambiguities I have described add complexity but provide no excuse for neglect or malfeasance. 

The TRNC government encourages migration but takes little responsibility for the dynamics that ensue, and it uses its non-recognition grievance as a scapegoat for not offering adequate legal protection or welfare provisions for migrants and refugees.  

Yet, the legal anomalies that surround Northern Cyprus do not merely stem from TRNC’s conduct as a self-declared state. Some of the legal ambiguity emerges from the way other actors engage with it. The UN arguably “fakes fakeness” providing so-called “persons of concern” with legally flimsy documents (see Part II).  

The RoC rejects the legitimacy of the TRNC and claims jurisdiction over the buffer zone but dodges the concurrent legal responsibility towards asylum-seekers. And it does not shy away from using the dubious status of the TRNC to banish asylum-seekers by dumping them in the buffer zone.  

On the 50th anniversary of the Turkish military intervention that brought the TRNC into being, legal fixes and political workarounds continue to accumulate. The Cyprus conflict has been deemed too comfortable for genuine resolution, but it is evidently more comfortable for some than for others. The predicaments sketched in this three-part blog highlight the hypocrisies around state recognition. And they underline the need for renewed efforts to resolve the fundamental problems of fragmented sovereignty in Cyprus. 

The author thanks Emmanuel Achiri, Oğuz Haksever, Darrian Traynor, Ayman Makarem, Hisham Rifai and Marika Sosnowski for their contributions.  

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