Turkey highlights open-door policy on World Refugee Day

Turkey highlights open-door policy on World Refugee Day

ANKARA

REUTERS photo

On the occasion of World Refugee Day, the Turkish Foreign Ministry has issued a statement highlighting Turkey’s open-door policy to all people fleeing oppression and cruelty, “without making any discrimination among them, as in compliance with our historic traditions.”   

Turkey was fulfilling its share of the duties in protecting refugees who were forced to leave their countries for various reasons, as well as working toward achieving the high humanitarian ideal of solving migration issues, the statement said.

Turkey has been host to more than 2.7 million Syrian refugees who have left their country since 2011.

Together with Iraqi and Afghan nationals, this figure is nearing 3 million, the statement said. 

“We are using every means available to provide that refugees live in our country according to conditions compatible with human dignity,” it added. 

As the Syrian humanitarian crisis has been openly revealed, refugee and migration issues call for responsibility and burden-sharing, it said. In this context, Turkey was doing its best in terms of both protection and providing humanitarian aid, while calling on the entire international community to act the same. 

In the occasion of World Refugee Day on June 20, Turkey once more declared it stood by people in desperate situations escaping cruelty in the world and that it would provide all kinds of support and the needed solidarity for them to achieve a human way of living.