Turkey: no refugee status for non-Europeans

“The law now grants full refugee status to those coming to Turkey from Europe, and provides for the establishment of a new civilian body to oversee refugee applications, a process currently handled by the police, who are often untrained… However, the new law stops short of lifting a geographical limitation widely criticized by rights groups. People arriving in Turkey "as a result of events from outside European countries" will only be given "conditional refugee" status. While Turkey is one of the original signatories to the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, it is one of only a small number of countries to maintain a limitation on where it will accept them from… Lifting its geographical limitation on asylum is a major condition for Turkey to join the European Union…”