Navigating the legal liminalities of a de facto state: Migrant precarity and placeholder identity papers in Northern Cyprus

Abstract

This article studies the contested legal–political dynamics around forced migration flows to and through an unrecognized state: the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). We adopt an analytical perspective drawn from the literature on performative politics and the legal anthropology of documents to explore how migration dynamics interact with the contested legal status of the TRNC. Our two main questions are: What practical shape do the human rights of refugees and asylum seekers take in an interstitial legal space, where the foundation of law is itself subject to ambiguity, suspension, and contestation? And what implications—opportunities and hazards—does this constellation have for refugees and asylum-seekers? Drawing on interviews, lived experience and fieldwork observations, we make two arguments. First, we contend that the interstitial status of the TRNC represents both an opportunity for refugees and a threat. Secondly, we argue that a purely legal or technical understanding of legal identity and concurrent rights is inadequate; we must subject these phenomena to a politically informed analysis of the everyday practices through which legal norms and spaces are continuously shaped and reshaped.

1. Introduction

In the centre of the Cypriot capital Nicosia, just outside the 16th-century ramparts of the Walled City—now home to baristas with the best views in town—stands a lonely white tent that displays the blue logo of the United Nations (UN) refugee agency. It offers rudimentary shelter to a man of Turkish-Kurdish origin, whom we will call Amjad. He grew up with a hostile police force and experienced a sequence of arrests, detainments, and maltreatment motivated by accusations of support for Kurdish separatism. He could not bear another prison sentence, so in December 2022, he boarded a flight to Ercan Airport, Northern Cyprus, a territory akin to an overseas province for Turkish travellers. In Nicosia, Amjad climbed down from the rampart wall and walked across the UN-monitored Green Line buffer zone to apply for asylum at the checkpoint of the Republic of Cyprus (RoC) in the South of the island. There, however, he was turned back. The police told him that one cannot apply for asylum via the buffer zone.

He did not want to return to the North. The self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) presents itself as a full-fledged independent state but has no asylum mechanism. As a de facto state, it is no signatory to the International Refugee Convention or other international law. Returning to the TRNC, he worried, would result in his deportation to Turkey. So, there he was, camping in an abandoned car park of the UN headquarters on the Green Line, between the TRNC checkpoint and the RoC checkpoint. This narrow strip of legal no man’s land separates a state and a de facto state, each with its own legal ambiguities. The RoC’s rejection of his asylum claim lacks a legal basis—the right to apply for asylum is non-derogable. The TRNC lacks a legal basis as a whole, at least in the eyes of the UN, the European Union (EU), the RoC and all other states except Turkey. Forty years after the split, the murky and ambiguous constellation of a divided Cyprus remains unresolved. Having camped in the buffer zone for ten months, at the time of writing, Amjad was waiting for a resolution. He was stuck in a legal landscape that is itself stuck.

Amjad’s plight is unusual in its visual display of an asylum-seeker getting caught up in the complex legal web around the contested fractures of Cypriot sovereignty. But the presence of forced migration flows to both the North and the South of Cyprus is far from exceptional. These flows raise a range of empirical, conceptual, and legal-normative questions, which resonate closely with the central concerns of this collection in Migration Studies (Fakhoury et al. 2024). In this article, we engage with two of these. What shape do the human rights of refugees and asylum seekers take in a liminal legal space, where the foundation of law is itself subject to ambiguity, suspension, and contestation? And what implications—opportunities and hazards—does this constellation have for refugees and asylum-seekers?

To explore these questions, our article brings two bodies of scholarship into dialogue. The first body concerns the scholarship on the lived realities of migratory practice in face of increasingly repressive and securitized border management (Cabot 2019; Eule et al. 2019; Mountz 2011; Scheel 2023). It problematizes the notions of illegal or irregular migration and observes the peculiar manifestations of international law and government policy when they interact with migrants, both in borderlands and elsewhere. The central focus of these analyses then lies with the logics and strategies that people adopt to secure their needs and pursue their aspirations amidst the maze of government migration management. The second body of work concerns the scholarship of de facto sovereign entities and unrecognized states (Bobick 2017; Klem and Maunaguru 2017; Bryant and Hatay 2020). It grapples with the interpretative problems of political bodies that empirically resemble state conduct but lack vital state qualities in terms of diplomatic recognition and legal validity. Rather than seeking to adjudicate the status of such entities, the authors we engage with place the liminal qualities of these entities at the heart of the equation and study the material effects and performative logics of these governance efforts.

We know from the first body of literature that migrants often rely on de facto forms of recognition and de facto procedures to (circum)navigate the formal migration procedures and delineations of legal categories. The steps and documents that ultimately facilitate the path towards a desired legal status or citizenship may diverge significantly from the flow charts of policy procedures. We know from the second body of work that de facto states may perform different forms of sovereign authority and associated governance functions to generate implied forms of internal and external recognition. Their de facto laws and policies often spawn a liminal space of legal ambiguity, overlap and contingent validity.¹ Both bodies of work combine in the migratory dynamics in and through Northern Cyprus, yielding a dynamic of staggered de facto constellations: one where the de facto papers and entitlements of asylum-seekers operate within the unresolved legal terrain of a de facto state.

To describe how migration dynamics interact with the contested legal status of the TRNC, we draw on the legal anthropology of documents (Kelly 2006; Das 2011; Bryant and Hatay 2020; Infantino 2023). Our work resonates closely with Navaro-Yashin’s (2007, 2012) well-known reflections on the ‘make-believe papers’ of Turkish Cypriots. It significantly shifts the focus, however: to asylum-seekers in Northern Cyprus and the functionality of—to stick with Navaro-Yashin’s idiom—their make-believe protection papers.

Our argument is twofold. First, we contend that the ambiguous status of the TRNC represents both an opportunity for refugees (hence the significant in-flux) and a threat (hence their precarious status). Secondly, we argue that a purely legal or technical understanding of legal identity and concurrent rights is inadequate; we must subject these phenomena to a politically informed analysis of the everyday practices through which legal norms and spaces are continuously shaped and reshaped.

This article is based on joint research by two authors with complementary backgrounds and experiences. Emmanuel Achiri lived in the TRNC for 8 years as a PhD student and migrant rights activist.² Apart from drawing on these professional observations and life experiences, he conducted twenty-three in-depth interviews for the present analysis in 2022 (of which three together with Bart Klem) and has had many formal and informal discussions with so-called persons of concern, refugee response professionals and TRNC officials over the past 5 years. Bart is a relative newcomer to the Cypriot context and conducted an additional thirty-nine in-depth interviews (alongside smaller informal discussions) across five research visits in 2022–2023 of 1 to 2 weeks each. Our interviews were held with asylum-seekers, refugee rights activists, researchers, as well as TRNC citizens of diverse backgrounds. The vast majority of these were recorded and transcribed; for a smaller number, we transcribed based on hand-written notes.³

This article proceeds in five sections before reaching its conclusions. The first two discuss conceptual and contextual background. The three empirical sections that follow respectively discuss: how the TRNC’s ambiguous status facilitates migratory opportunities; how this status simultaneously generates precarity; and the peculiar role that ‘person of concern’ letters play in this context.

2. On citizenship, legal identity, and documents

Citizenship is considered a central bulwark against rightlessness (Bloom and Kingston 2021) and calls to safeguard legal identity for all (e.g. through universal birth registration) have gained ascendency (Manby 2021). Some authors argue that legal identity is best understood as a claim rather than a status, given the struggles and strategies that are often required to effect basic rights (Das 2011; Bloemraad 2018). Moreover, in many cases, it is more accurate to speak of degrees of citizenship and citizenship constellations, rather than a singular and exclusive citizenship of one state (Isin 2008; Bauböck 2010; Sosnowski 2020; Ganohariti 2024). Large numbers of people have a relationship with several states, and many states have more than one kind of citizen, be it in theory or in practice. None of these authors contest the importance of well-documented citizenship to human rights, but it is not simply about making sure that a person is recognized as a citizen by a state. Rather, we need to understand how a person’s legal identity yields an array of rights and duties vis-à-vis one or more states; and how this requires that person to navigate convoluted, and sometimes overlapping, legal–political landscapes to claim these rights.

Legal identity documents play a central role in these navigation strategies. Such documents are not inert derivatives of the law. They do things to people and to situations. They can be used like masks rather than plain identifiers (Kelly 2006; Navaro-Yashin 2007), and they can have unforeseen cascading effects when one form of written endorsement facilitates other forms of recognition or entitlement (Das 2011; Cabot 2012; 2019; Eule et al. 2019; Infantino 2023; Scheel 2023). Legal identity documents are thus not hostage to their legal veracity. They may assume new meaning and significance through the creative ways in which they are used in practice. They can exhibit ceremonial qualities and produce dramatic effects, but they are not just props and their effects are not imaginary. They broker access to real services and funds, they yield real punishment or exclusion, and when somebody decides to withhold them or tear them up, there are material consequences.

These reflections provide a helpful vantage point to grapple with the murky legal constellations around identity documents issued by a self-declared and largely unrecognized state (Sosnowski and Klem 2024). If we follow a strict legal reasoning, then an illegal authority clearly cannot issue legal documents. Yet, universal human rights norms require us to consider the subjects of these de facto states, and this almost invariably means interacting with their de facto documents. De facto states are diverse phenomena (Crawford 2006; Wilson 2016; Berg and Ker-Linday 2020; Kyris 2022), but they tend to be subject to some version of the following legal contradiction. On the one hand, there are firm legal imperatives that prohibit established states to recognize these purportedly illegal entities, and as such there is only marginal space (if at all) for these entities to become parties to international law. On the other hand, the human rights of the people under their control must be protected, which instils the need to countenance these de facto states and their documents, and this may in turn yield implied forms of recognition (Fortin 2016, 2021; Grzybowski 2017). Moreover, such entities may be accepted parties to international humanitarian law (be it as ‘non-state armed groups’) and must thus be reckoned with.

In analytical terms, the governing practices of de facto states pose a similar interpretative dilemma. Cataloguing these entities from the vantage point of what they are supposed to be according to domestic law, international law or their international political status yields a skewed picture. The whole reason these entities exist pivots on their opposition to these legal and political trappings. Conversely, cataloguing these entities from the vantage point of what they claim to be yields an overly naïve interpretation. The fact that they are not quite that which they aspire is central to understanding the whole phenomenon of a de facto state. Describing the governing apparatus of Taiwan, Abkhazia, or the Tibetan Government-in-exile as a State, as a state, as a ‘state’, as a state with prefixes (pseudo-, quasi-), or as not a state (even an illegal entity) has vast analytical, political, and legal implications.

Rather than seeking to resolve this to-be-or-not-to-be conundrum—or fudge it with a term that side-steps this indeterminacy—some of the recent scholarship places this unresolvedness at the heart of the analytical equation (Wilson 2016; Bobick 2017; Klem and Maunaguru 2017). In the societies concerned, we do not yet know whether the political architecture will hold, whether its laws are valid, and whether its coercive power will retrospectively be legitimized. This is not an obstacle to our analysis; it is the point. It is because of this contingent nature that we see the dynamics that we see: deliberately blurred boundaries, strategic ambiguity, and legal skulduggery; subjects that explore and exploit administrative grey zones and broker back-up options anchored in other states; polities that experiment with institutional forms, diplomatic overtures, and mimetic alignment of legal norms in pursuit of implied forms of recognition. Such dynamics make sense because of the contingent nature of the sovereign constellation, not despite of it.

3. Suspended sovereignty and legal liminality in Cyprus

The protracted conflict over sovereignty in Cyprus and the enduring sovereign experiment of the TRNC have received detailed academic attention. There has been scrutiny of constitutional dimensions (Dodd 1996), the dynamics of internal forced displacement, migration, and the resultant ‘asymmetric citizenship’ (Loizides 2011; Krasniqi 2019), and the scruples of international engagement with the TRNC (Kyris 2022). Scholars have drawn on the conceptual language of aporias (Bryant and Hatay 2020), the state of exception (Constantinou 2008), and affect (Navaro-Yashin 2012) to grapple with the unsettled status of the state in Northern Cyprus.

Cyprus’ history of conflict and the genealogy of the TRNC may be summarized in the following broad strokes. As a crossroads between continents, civilizations and empires, Cyprus has a kaleidoscopic wealth of cultural influences, heritage, and legacies. Its societal composition comprises many small communities and two major ones: the Greek–Cypriot majority and the Turkish-Cypriot minority, which used to live interspersed across the whole island. Soon after independence (1960), the constitutional arrangement for communal representation and power sharing between both communities baulked and then crumbled. In the resultant escalation of communal violence, the Turkish-Cypriot community was forced to retreat into besieged enclaves (Bryant and Hatay 2011). In 1974, a Greek-supported coup prompted the Turkish military to invade the Northern part of Cyprus (citing the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee as a mandate). This resulted in a permanent uprooting and unmixing of the two communities, with the Greek–Cypriot community living in the South (and West) and the Turkish-Cypriot community in the Turkish-occupied North (and East). While the Republic of Cyprus (RoC) in the South continued to be ruled under a truncated Cypriot constitution (persistently violated in the name of the ‘doctrine of necessity’, Hadjigeorgiou and Kyriakou 2020), the North adopted an interim administrative set-up in 1975 in anticipation of a future federal arrangement—the Turkish Federated State of Cyprus. The so-called Green Line, home to a long-standing UN monitoring mission, disabled travel between the North and the South. The UN denounced the Turkish occupation and continues to treat the TRNC as an illegal and invalid entity until today. Ironically, the entity with the most tenuous claim to territory or sovereignty in Cyprus, the UK, retained its so-called Sovereign Base Areas along the Southern coast.

With the underlying sovereign and constitutional problem in permanent stasis, the Northern polity declared the TRNC in 1983. The TRNC was only recognized by Ankara, and it was subjected to a persistent UN and EU trade embargo. Cyprus’ 2004 accession to the EU added a further layer of complexity. EU membership had been envisaged as a corroboration of a comprehensive peace accord brokered under the auspices of Kofi Annan. However, when the Greek–Cypriot community rejected the Annan Plan in a referendum in 2004 and Cyprus nonetheless joined the Union, a peculiar legal constellation ensued. While the whole island notionally became EU territory, the TRNC remained unrecognized and embargoed, with the Acquis Communautaire applicable in principle but suspended pending a resolution of Cyprus’ sovereign question. The opening of the Green Line gates in 2003 and the ability of the majority of Turkish Cypriots to get an EU passport via their inherited claim to being Cypriot citizens (though this policy has many rough edges: see e.g. Hopman et al. 2018) yielded a landscape of overlapping legality and subjectivity with a highly porous RoC–TRNC boundary.

While the TRNC cannot be a recognized signatory to international legal frameworks, one could argue it is held by the international law it has inherited, though its current application is subject to debate (Safi 2019). Moreover, it can unilaterally bind itself to international human rights norms and replicate these in its domestic legal framework to solicit esteem from recognized states, as it has done with the EU Human Rights Convention, the Conventions on Civil and Political Rights and the Rights of the Child, and other legal frameworks (Pasha 2018). In terms of refugee law, which is most relevant to this paper, Cyprus inherited the 1951 International Refugee Convention (then signed by the UK) when it became independent, and it signed the 1967 Additional Protocol. Northern Cyprus, it could be argued, inherited its adherence to both these instruments when it declared itself an autonomous claimant to Cypriot sovereignty, first as a federated state (1974) and then as an independent republic (1983).

On-the-ground developments have been rather more ambiguous. For most of its post-independence history, Cyprus has experienced a combination of internal displacement (due to in-country communal violence) and flows of refugees coming to or through Cyprus. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) started operating in 1974 with a mandate to protect people both North and South of the Green Line. With the ceasing of militarized violence, the Green Line becoming a porous boundary and the RoC an EU Member State, UNHCR’s role and mandate have changed significantly. Accession to the EU required the RoC to develop an asylum mechanism to conform with European norms, thus gradually taking over much of the work UNHCR had been doing. In the North, UNHCR established a practice of working via a proxy—the Refugee Rights Association (RRA)—to avoid direct interaction with the TRNC authorities. UNHCR thus has a minimal operational presence in Northern Cyprus and struggles to identify a legal duty-bearer when refugee rights are violated—the accepted duty-bearer (RoC) lacks presence and the present duty-bearers either lack legality (TRNC) or deny legal responsibility (Turkey). In the absence of a domestic TRNC asylum framework, the RRA (as a UNHCR proxy) has no legal anchor points to redress violations. Refugee law is universal so it must be possible to claim refugee status in Northern Cyprus, but any conception of being a refugee within the TRNC falters on the above-discussed legal contradictions.

In short, the island of Cyprus has a highly convoluted and compromised legal landscape with: a recognized sovereign state that routinely violates its own constitution (RoC); a purportedly illegal state with a juridical system that interacts with international law (TRNC); the extraterritorial sovereign space of a former colonial power (UK); a UN-monitored buffer zone (Green Line); and EU and other international legal frameworks that purportedly pertain only to one of the two claimants to Cypriot sovereignty but affect both. To understand the dynamics that we see, it is of limited analytical use to try and apply legal categories to ground situations. What we are witnessing is a ceaseless struggle over creating and interpreting these ground situations in relation to the law.

4. The loopholes of a liminal space

Given its economic and political isolation, the TRNC economy thrives on its ability to attract people and offer them paid services, ranging from university education, to tourism, to medical care, to casinos and brothels. Large numbers of labour migrants and university students choose to come to the TRNC, given its relatively high welfare levels (compared to some countries of origin) and because it has a simple visa-on-arrival procedure for nearly all countries. A growing number of refugees, from Syria and elsewhere, also make their way to the TRNC. With the easing of Green Line restrictions and the RoC becoming an EU member state, the TRNC has become a porous fringe of the EU. Permission to cross the Green Line is reserved for Cypriots (with the RoC fiercely trying to exclude families that it considers to be Turkish “settlers”) and EU citizens (with a special post-Brexit arrangement for UK citizens). However, other foreign nationals residing in the North on a student- or work visa, who may simultaneously have a credible claim to refugee status (4.5% in international students according to a recent survey, VOIS 2022), can surreptitiously make their way across the Green Line to apply for asylum in the South. For those whose work or studies are concluded or disrupted (and whose visa thus expires), crossing to the RoC is a way of averting deportation. Most, however, stay in the North (e.g. because of cultural and religious similarities), even if applying for asylum in the TRNC is impossible, given its absence in the TRNC law.

Initially, UNHCR stepped into this legal void by holding status-determination interviews—via its proxy (the RRA)—with the aim of facilitating refugee resettlement in a third country. The preparedness of third countries to take in refugees from Cyprus, however,dropped to negligible proportions now that Cyprus was itself an EU member state. Issuing refugee status to people who would end up residing in Northern Cyprus had limited utility given that this status had no legal meaning, and because UNHCR refrained from directly offering protection to refugees in the TRNC. From 2014 onwards, UNHCR thus stopped issuing refugee certificates and replaced these with certificates identifying an applicant as a ‘person of concern’, a document to which we will return below. Based on our interview with three representatives in their Nicosia office, UNHCR considers three general ways of redressing the TRNC as a legal void in refugee law: (1) the persons concerned get sent back to Turkey (all flights to Ercan airport come from or via Turkey), which is considered a ‘safe’ third country; (2) they voluntarily choose to stay in ‘occupied’ area (the TRNC) and receive a ‘person of concern’ letter as needed; (3) somehow they independently make their way to the ‘government-controlled’ areas (the RoC) and apply for asylum.

Several worries about refugee rights violations could thus be addressed, but as so often ground realities defy this neat legal reasoning, for example because flow patterns change unexpectedly. For a few months between April to June 2019, the porosity of the Green Line expanded from a local Cypriot loophole to a concerted travel route from Syria to the EU, due to a policy change in neighbouring Lebanon. The Lebanese government started imposing greater restrictions on Syrian refugees entering or residing in Lebanon, resulting in a diversion of displacement flows and a cat-and-mouse dynamic between border regulations and travel routes. Syrian travellers (estimated to be roughly around 1200–1300 persons in that time frame) would embark in Syria (with Turkish or Pegasus Airlines), transited in Beirut as they no longer had access to Lebanese territory and then in Istanbul or Adana, to then proceed to Ercan Airport (TRNC), without having set foot in another country and without needing any pre-departure visa. They would be detained at Ercan, but in the absence of a legal and feasible destination to deport them, the circumstances in the airport cells deteriorated rapidly. UNHCR and RRA therefore felt a need to act. What ensued was a de facto shuttle service from the TRNC airport to the RoC custom’s checkpoint on the Green Line.

These asylum seekers (the vast majority Syrian) were kept in the Ercan airport detention centre. An RRA staff member would hold so-called pre-screening interviews to clarify their claim to asylum and whether they wanted to cross to the RoC. The applications of that day’s arrivals would then be vetted by the UNHCR. ‘I would go to Ercan at 8 in the morning’, one of the RRA officers told us, ‘and I needed to finish everything by 8 PM. We used to have like 80 or 90 arrivals a day’. If these preliminary applications were endorsed, then UNHCR would ‘send us a letter containing their names’ on the next day. She would shuttle between different TRNC authorities—the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Police headquarters—to get all the stamps and signatures required to allow them to legally traverse the TRNC. ‘Then the police at Ercan would put them in a bus and send them to the Ledra Palace crossing and the police would allow them to cross to the South’, where they would apply for asylum in the RoC, on the other side of the Green Line. The next morning, the whole process started afresh for the next group of arrivals.

Clearly, UNHCR wanted to avoid any impression that they were facilitating an irregular migration flow, so ‘we used to be very careful’, the RRA officer emphasized to us. ‘I would drive with my own car and go to the crossing point. I would never engage with the refugees. They would do their thing with the police. They would cross the buffer zone. And I would stay [there] for 3 or 4 hours to make sure no one comes back. Because if they come back, they would be stuck in the buffer zone.’ UNHCR would then try to resolve matters. In other words, an institutionalized modus operandi emerged, between UNHCR (and its proxy the RRA), the TRNC authorities and (though tacitly) the RoC authorities, to handle the paperwork and transport services in bulk.

The growing number of arrivals at Ercan airport soon caused procedural delays, and the airport detention centre became drastically overcrowded. Frustrated immigration officers drove new arrivals to detention centres outside of the airport. Their request to increase the capacity of the detention centres was ignored by the TRNC government. ‘And then there was an outbreak of an infectious disease in the detention centre at Ercan,’ a refugee response professional in the North explained. Journalists turned up and caused a media storm. ‘The media were awful. […] They would come to the Ledra Palace crossing […] and take pictures of refugees crossing to the South. They were showing people’s faces and saying that smugglers have learnt this route and are sending people here to come and cross. It was a huge thing in the North.’ In the South, which has its own tribulations with refuge and asylum (as discussed elsewhere in this issue: Fischer 2024), this dynamic also attracted media attention and heated debate.

Faced with this media spectacle (and alleged political pressure from the RoC via Turkey), the TRNC Council of Ministers amended its immigration law on 19 June 2019, thus requiring people from Syria (as was already the case for Armenia and Nigeria) to apply for visa prior to arrival.⁴ This effectively shut the legal route to the TRNC—and via the TRNC to the RoC—for Syrian refugees. After all, there were no visas that reflected the actual reason of travel and as a de facto state, the TRNC does not have much consular representation abroad, which added practical hurdles. ‘What it meant was that the arrivals stopped in one day,’ a refugee rights activist told us, ‘because they didn't allow [Syrians] on the plane in Lebanon after this decision was announced’. Ironically, that day was the day before World Refugee Day. RRA officers pleaded to the responsible minister that this was not going to stop arrivals, but rather make it perilous for many: ‘I personally told him: “if you do this, you are going to make people come in irregular ways and most people are going to lose their lives on the way. You will not cut refugees and asylum seekers from coming to Cyprus. You will make them come via dangerous routes.” And he said: “no, you don’t know a thing about it, I know that it is going to be over.” And now see what happened.’ After the closure of this channel, there has been a rapid growth of boat arrivals, mainly with Syrian travellers.

5. The hazardous cracks of international law

While the unresolved sovereign status of the TRNC affords possibilities, that same status also engenders threats for diverse groups of migrants. Large numbers of people get deported, detained, or stuck in TRNC territory, and there are few protections and safeguards. International refugee law is de facto suspended, and the unresolved status of the TRNC deters UNHCR from operating on its territory. Under international law, the TRNC is treated as RoC territory occupied by Turkey, thus diverting the duty to uphold human rights to Turkey, which may then prompt the TRNC to act. As a result, the principle of non-refoulement has no clear anchor in the legal landscape of Northern Cyprus and given the unresolved status of its borders, the spatial ramifications of refoulement as a concept remain ambiguous. Is rejection at the RoC checkpoint in the buffer zone refoulement, if we do not consider the Green Line an international border? Are boat push-overs by the RoC to TRNC waters refoulement, if we do not consider the TRNC a state? Is deportation from the TRNC to Turkey refoulement, if the TRNC is subject to Turkey as occupying power under international law? A supposedly universal human rights norm thus gets mangled in the grind between the competing legal machineries of Cypriot sovereignty.

The growing numbers of boat arrivals on TRNC beaches after the imposition of pre-travel visa from Syria are routinely incarcerated and deported in bulk to Turkey, irrespective of their nationality. Migrants who lose their residency status as an international student or worker get picked up in periodic waves of police inspection (or for incidental reasons, such as incurring a fine). They are charged with a visa offence, detained and deported to their country of origin, even when they have grounded fear for persecution or other harm when deported, for example, because of their sexual identity, health condition, political orientation or civil war in their (supposed) home country. Both among the boat arrivals and those who lose their visa residency status, there are large numbers of people who meet the criteria of being a refugee, but the unresolved legal status of the TRNC forecloses a legal claim on this ground.

Behind this description of abstract procedures and flows of unnamed individuals evidently lies an intimate world of complex human beings who were subject to harrowing experiences. An illustrative account was related to us by a young man, whom we will call Rishad. He was born in a Middle Eastern country that he does not want us to name. He spent his childhood and secondary school years there, but in 2014 the violence of the escalating war drew closer, he realized it was not safe to stay.

I applied for many scholarships, to study a bachelor’s degree abroad. And then one day, on the internet, I saw an agency registering people in the TRNC. So I searched a little bit. What is TRNC? I did not really know. My interest was a place with a paper that allowed me to travel. I applied for a school and I got 50% scholarship discount. I thought it was a huge thing, but they do this to everyone. The discount price is the amount they want.

Rishad knew that he would not be able to pay tuition fees for more than a year. ‘I was working in cafes, restaurants. Anything that can stop me from starving. But the income was negligible. The pressure of my legal status was huge, and the studying was there.’ He managed to hold out, but in 2019 his passport expired. Renewing it posed practical problems: it was not safe to travel to his country of origin and its embassies were not functioning in a reliable way. He could have tried to use go-betweens and bribes, but ‘deep inside me, I thought, this passport was issued by a government that I no longer want to belong to. I am not going to renew.’ Also: ‘It is not a good thing to have such a passport. There could be complications that I was not even aware off.’ Several months later, he got picked up by the TRNC police, as he was rough sleeping.

I was brought to the judge, and I was trying to talk to him. Trying to see who is my lawyer. I wanted to explain that I am not a criminal. I am someone who could not renew his residence permit. Because of reasons. I cannot go back. […] They told me: ‘you will go back to your country’. ‘But my country is in a state of war’. ‘I don’t care’. So I explicitly said, I am a refugee in a way. I cannot go back because of fear for persecution. […] I wanted to speak, but the police slapped me on the hand and told me to shut up. Bum bum bum, the judge finished the hearing and back to the police station. And then to detention. In that cell, I met criminals that I would not meet in a lifetime. […] I was shouting for food. They beat me and locked me in a cell for a whole day as a punishment. They gave me one sandwich for the whole day and no water.

They allocated him a lawyer, who then tried to exploit him, by asking for large amounts of money and refusing to contact any of Rishad’s friends. However, the TRNC authorities could not deport him, for some of the same problems that he himself was facing. ‘They could not find a flight for me. There is no functional airport [in his country of origin]. And my passport was expired, so they could not send me to Turkey. And they could not get a travel document from the embassy, because they are not operational. So I was just there.’ In the end, he managed to contact VOIS Cyprus (the international students union), who alerted the RRA, who came to conduct screening interviews. They pleaded to the authorities that Rishad should not be detained as a refugee and indicated that he had become a ‘person of concern’ to the UNHCR. After 2 weeks of detention, he was released.

Going by the interviews we held with both (forced) migrants and refugee rights activists, Rishad’s precarity is not exceptional. One activist told us:

Nobody [from the public] knows that we have irregular [boat] arrivals every day. Every day. Not just once a month or twice a month, like it says in the news. We have irregular arrivals everyday, sometimes twice a day. 30 people, 40 people. 60 people. 100 people. And they are just taken. We would interview them. They would be sent to the central prison, which is already overcrowded. […] It depends on the judge to give 15 days of sentence, 30 days of sentence, 2 months, and then they are deported. Nobody knows about them. It is a system that only we and the government know.

The RoC coast guard and Frontex are complicit in these practices, this refugee activist added. People arriving on boats have declared that these law enforcers direct or push boats into TRNC waters. Such a push-over tactic (rather than push-back, though in legal terms there is arguably little difference) enables the RoC to use the dubious status of TRNC (which it vehemently rejects) as a channel to flush out boat arrivals.

In the TRNC, boat arrivals are typically arrested, and their subsequent treatment has many shortcomings. Children over 12 years old are treated as adults under TRNC law. Those under 12 years old are kept in a poorly equipped shelter of the social services department. This yields additional anguish. Children, sometimes toddlers, become separated from their families without understanding what is happening. With UNHCR support, the RRA advocates towards state authorities to ‘take care of people’s needs, clothing, food water, access to health care, while in detention. Because it is a state duty when somebody is in their custody’. And they intervene in court to provide detainees with moral and legal support, and to expedite their deportation if there is no viable alternative—which is the case for the vast majority of people. One of the activists explained: ‘In the ideal world, they would not be punished. But since we don’t have any mechanism to prevent that, we try to keep the detention period as short as possible.’

These grievances and injustices are evidently not unique to Northern Cyprus. There is abundant research to evidence that migrants face similar mistreatment in fully recognized countries, which are accepted signatories to international law and have a legally valid institutional apparatus (Mountz 2011; Eule et al. 2019; Scheel 2023). Yet, as we have illustrated above, the dubious legal status of the TRNC adds a layer of precarity, because channels of legal redress—to claim asylum, to mobilize refugee law, to challenge migrant detention, deportation and refoulement—are not merely arduous, they are missing.

The COVID-19 pandemic dealt a further blow to the mobility and welfare of migrants and refugees in Northern Cyprus. As lockdowns and border restrictions were declared across the globe, the RoC suspended the Green Line arrangement and closed its checkpoints. When they were later re-opened, the requirement for COVID documents (vaccination card, negative test) was not the only new addition. This is also when the RoC started rejecting any asylum application that was made at the Green Line checkpoints out of hand (Trimikliniotis et al. 2023). Amjad, the person camping in the UN-monitored buffer zone whom we started this article with, was stuck for this reason.

Growing up as a Kurd in Eastern Turkey, Amjad was first imprisoned at the age of 13 years, he told us.

‘The reason was that I had used violence against three policemen’, he explained. ‘These three policemen that I was claimed to have attacked got three days of medical leave. […]’ You may think: ‘how can a 13-year-old beat up three policemen?’ but the judge did not think that. This is the fascist ideology that state servants have. They think that Kurdish people are capable of any violence.”

He finished high school and worked in a shop but kept running into problems and was in and out of prison throughout. During the pandemic,

people with smaller sentences were let go [from prison]. I was in that situation. […] There was a price to lift the restriction that barred me from leaving the country. So I paid that, and then I flew straight to Ercan [the TRNC airport]. I do not have a passport and I cannot have one, since I still have time to serve in prison. But you don’t have to show your passport to come to Northern Cyprus. I showed my ID.

He cleared TRNC customs with that same ID and when he arrived in Nicosia, he was put in touch with another Kurdish person, who knew his way in Cyprus. At night, they jumped down the rampart walls that separate the Northern part of the city from the buffer zone and they walked across to the RoC checkpoint. They were offered to wait inside and have tea and cookies, but when the police turned up in the morning,

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’. We did not take that risk. If we go in and they arrest us and they extradite us, to Greece and then to Turkey, I will not be able to leave again. So we turned back to the buffer zone and settled here.

Soon after, his friend disappeared. Amjad stayed. ‘The UN police gave me this tent and some things. And now I am here for some time.’ About a year before Amjad arrived, three refugees from Cameroon were stuck camping in the zone for seven months. The reason the RoC left them there, it was believed, was to deter any other people from trying to enter this way and to generate pressure on fellow EU states to step up their intake of refugees. Two of them were eventually taken care of when the Pope visited and offered them citizenship to the Vatican when he heard about their plight and learnt that they were Christians (AP 2021).

Amjad was stuck in a legal landscape with several dubious legal assertions. The RoC refused to accept his asylum claim, but this rejection had no legal ground. The TRNC rested on a contested legal foundation in its entirety. Amjad could decide to return to this self-declared republic, but he would always be worried about being extradited. ‘If they take me back to Turkey, I will not see daylight again. They would put me in prison.’ Even if that did not happen, he would end up living in an open-air prison, because the TRNC, as a pariah de facto state, has only two exits—across the Green Line or via Turkey—and both would be closed to him.⁵ As explained below, this is precisely what happened to Rishad.

6. The troubled status of a placeholder document

While Rishad’s release from prison saved him from a terrible plight, it did not resolve his legal status in the TRNC. Both his passport and his TRNC visa had expired, and he received regular prompts that the penalty for overstaying remained in force. RRA, as a proxy of UNHCR, averted his deportation, but it did not offer him refugee status. As mentioned above, UNHCR used to apportion refugee status to people residing in the North up until 2014. While this had no traction in TRNC law, it comprised a legal status. It had validity under the Refugee Convention, and as such it was not bound to national borders and there was an appeal procedure for applicants whose claim had been rejected.

In place of these refugee determinations, UNHCR started issuing letters designating its bearers as persons of concern (PoC), depicted in Fig. 1. These documents carry the UNHCR logo and stamp, a person’s individual details (name, date and place of birth, nationality, photo), a UNHCR registration number, and the signature of the respective UNHCR officer. They are issued via the RRA, which collects a person’s data, distributes the letter, and briefs recipients about what this document does and does not entail. The letters have a validity of one year and are then re-issued as needed. The letter certifies ‘that the above-named person is a person of concern to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and should, in particular, be protected from forcible return to a country where this person would face threats to his or her life or freedom’. As such, the protection letters prevent deportation, and they are supposed to facilitate its bearer’s access to health care, permission to work and free education for children. There is no appeal procedure for people who requested a letter but did not get one, nor have the criteria for approval or rejection been made public. While these letters have by and large proven effective in preventing deportation and unlocking access to basic services, they do not offer the bearer a legal residence status. Being a person of concern is not a category in TRNC regulations; it means being a person that the authorities have informally decided to tolerate on their soil. Until they decide otherwise.

UNHCR and RRA do not reveal how many of these letters have been issued. Given the wobbly legal foundations of these PoC letters, this make-do solution could easily disintegrate with too much publicity. One of the refugee rights activists summed it up as follows:

Legally speaking it is very complicated. This PoC letter is a result of the lobbying efforts of the RRA in the past. This has led to a practice and thankfully the administration has not changed their mind. Even in our advocacy work, sometimes we want to demand for more rights, but we are also very scared because they could easily challenge. It is not legal, it is just a practice emerging out of the implied international human rights obligations of the TRNC. It can easily be abused or changed by the ministers. If it is challenged legally, it will be removed. This is one reason why we don't voice our criticism about the system these days because we don’t want to bring it to the attention of the authorities.

Initially, one of her colleagues added, refugee activists would advocate towards the TRNC authorities to raise their game.

We would talk to the Ministry of Interior. ‘If you want to call yourself a state, then you have to obey the rule of non-refoulement and non-criminalization’. But they just don’t care.

In recent years, their strategy has shifted to keeping a low profile and presenting the validity of these letters as routine matter. Another activist underlined the precarity of the arrangement:

Maybe one day, another minister will come and say ‘what is this paper. I don't care. I don't have refugee law in my country’. […] So we cannot tell people that this is full protection. […] Governments change all the time in the TRNC. You will build a bridge with the government. The next day you wake up and you hear that the government has changed, and you have to introduce yourself from the beginning. So we don't say ‘okay you have to accept this.’ But we say (imitating a cheerful matter-of-factly voice): ‘okay, there is a process, this is how this is done.’ We don’t start the conversation from the beginning every time.

While the person-of-concern letters enable (de facto) asylum seekers to stay in the TRNC, the question of their legal status is endlessly deferred. The threat of deportation is present like a sword of Damocles. The letter insulates bearers from active government deportation efforts, but if people have to appear in court for a minor offence like not paying a traffic fine, judges will likely become aware of the outstanding deportation order and will not accept a person-of-concern letter to have any relevance—after all, it is issued by UNHCR, an entity that has no legal presence in the TRNC. Every now and then, the police raids neighbourhoods with large numbers of immigrants to check people’s papers, resulting in imprisonments and deportations. One of the letter-holders explained:

In court the judge said the protection paper was not confirmed by the Turkish Cypriot (TRNC) immigration office. He said the protection letter did not matter […] because the protection paper is European and foreign. So, he said I did not have a valid permission to stay.

The letter has no status in the RoC and it does also not validate border crossings. Travelling to Turkey (e.g. to visit an embassy to apply for a passport) or onwards (e.g. to attend a funeral or visit family) comes at great peril, because immigration officers at Ercan airport will not routinely accept a person-of-concern letter. One Nigerian letter-holder described his ordeal:

So when I was leaving, I got a paper saying that I could not return […] I showed them my refugee paper [person-of-concern letter], but they didn’t even look at it. The police only said, I didn’t have a problem, only that I couldn’t come back.

Several months later, this person has not been allowed to re-enter the TRNC. Bearers of these letters are thus (de facto) protected against deportation, but in effect they end up being indefinitely detained in a small de facto state, like a walled enclave from which they cannot safely leave. If the TRNC is a ‘state in waiting’, these people are stuck in its indefinite waiting room.

As a placeholder document, however, the person-of-concern letter facilitates contingent entry into the self-referential circles of legal status (somewhat in line with the trajectories described by Cabot (2019) and Infantino (2023)). Being able to stay may enable people to find a job; having a job may enable them to apply for a work permit; holding a work permit for five consecutive years enables people to apply for permanent residence (a so-called white ID or beyaz kimlik); and after 11 years, they could supposedly apply for TRNC citizenship. Clearly this is an arduous trajectory with several hurdles (including a discriminatory and precarious labour market and administrative uncertainties), and its meagre end result is being a citizen of a questionable state (with problem-free travel only to Turkey).

In sum, the person-of-concern letter is an extreme example of Das’ (2011) assertion that legal identity is a claim rather than a status. It is formally issued by a UN organization to an exclusive group of people based on principles of refugee law, and as such it provisionally overrides legal residency status. The TRNC government does not legally recognize the letter, but then the very reason this letter is issued is that the TRNC government is itself not legally recognized. These letters broker a relationship between disparate systems of meaning—not just between those who issue the letter and those who receive it, but also between the unrecognized state of the TRNC and the arena of international law that it seeks to be part of. A person-of-concern letter affords a de facto status within a de facto state. It comprises a placeholder document, an interim solution to navigate an unresolved legal constellation, but as a form of contingent residency, it affords potential avenues towards a more recognized status.

7. Conclusions

To understand the liminal legal spaces of refugee flows to and through Northern Cyprus, we need to combine the idiosyncrasies of migration politics around Europe’s external border (Cabot 2012, 2019; Eule et al. 2019; Scheel 2023) and the idiosyncrasies of the frozen conflict over Cypriot sovereignty (Constantinou 2008; Krasniqi 2019; Hadjigeorgiou and Kyriakou 2020; Kyris 2022). Our article brings together these two well-established fields of scholarship to make sense of the peculiar legal constellation that ensues in the TRNC and to explore its implications for refugees and asylum-seekers.

On the one hand, our analysis highlights that the ambiguous status of the TRNC yields a transnational opportunity space for human mobility. Its peculiar legal, infrastructural, and political constellation has turned this de facto state into a significant hub for forced migration, educational migration and labour migration (and the shades of grey in between). The TRNC combines an active immigration policy (mainly for the university sector and a poorly paid work force) with radically open visa requirements (with visa-on-arrival for nearly all countries) and a highly porous boundary with the EU territory of the RoC. And for a short spell, in 2019, it enabled an informal kind of visa-free transit for refugees from Syria right up to EU customs. Even if recent laws and policies from both the South and the North impose restrictions, Northern Cyprus continues to attract foreigners: as students, workers or refugees; on a commercial airline or ferry, or a smuggler’s boat; using the TRNC as thoroughfare or destination.

On the other hand, the TRNC’s ambiguous legal status generates a welter of hazards and precarities for migrant and refugee populations. Many of the problems we describe are familiar to migration scholars (Mountz 2011; Cabot 2019; Eule et al. 2019; Scheel 2023). Perfectly recognized states create mechanisms with dubious legal foundations that generate profound migrant precarity. However, there is an additional layer of problems in de facto states like the TRNC. As an unrecognized pariah state, it cannot become a formal party to international legal instruments, such as the International Refugee Convention and it repels direct engagement by international actors, such as UNHCR. As a result, key forms of legal redress in relation to human rights violations of migrant and refugee populations are missing. TRNC law makes no reference to asylum or to refugees and given its own dubious legal status, the application of international norms is impractical. As Rishad’s experience shows, refugees are exposed to arbitrary detention, inhumane treatment and refoulement (though Rishad averted the latter). As Amjad’s plight shows, the Cyprus problem offers the RoC a pretext to deny the right to asylum, leaving refugees stuck, either in the UN buffer zone (like Amjad) or on a TRNC territory that resembles an open-air prison (like Rishad and many others).

In an attempt to redress their grievances, UNHCR uses a proxy NGO (the RRA) to provide person-of-concern letters to what are in fact refugees, who either want to stay in the TRNC or have no way of leaving. These documents by and large prevent deportation, and they facilitate access to basic services, and as such they unlock a potential (though long and arduous) route to TRNC citizenship, which is another legal anomaly. What we see here is thus not merely a sovereign experiment of an aspiring state (the TRNC) staging improvised institutional forms to enact itself as a state. We also see migrants and refugees improvising their way across this convoluted legal landscape. And we see international actors, such as UNHCR, engaging in improvised conduct with proxy arrangements, replica legal norms and placeholder documents to grapple with a space that defies the doctrines of international law. This results in a de facto status (being a person of concern) within a de facto state (the TRNC). If the legal identity documents that the TRNC issues to its (de facto) citizens are ‘make-belief papers’ (Navaro-Yashin 2007), the same is arguably true for the person-of-concern letter. Unlike the TRNC identity documents, the legality of the issuing authority’s stamp and logo are not in question (UNHCR is well-recognized as a bulwark of international refugee law), but by asserting its authority in the contested territory of TRNC, it generates a legally ambiguous document.

These observations underscore the limits of formal legal and political reasoning. Any attempt to understand the constellation we have described from the vantage point of legal doctrine or an adjudication of the TRNC’s political status collapses under its own contradictions. Simply treating the TRNC as unrecognized, illegal, and invalid helps account for the circumspect international engagement with this self-declared republic, but it is utterly unhelpful to understand Amjad’s condition in the buffer zone or the compromised posturing vis-a-vis the legal and political bodies of the TRNC. Moreover, it yields a void of legal duty-bearers and thus clashes with the purported universality of human rights. Conversely, simply taking the TRNC for what it claims to be helps account for a ground reality of a consolidated state architecture, but it shoves crucial limitations, ambiguities, and uncertainties around the TRNC’s conduct under the carpet.

Instead of taking either of these extreme positions, we place the contingent, the not-yet-known status of the TRNC at the heart of the analytical equation. Rather than seeking to squeeze the legal and political realities that we see into the received categories of the prevalent global order of states, our analyses should centre on the persistent struggle over-interpreting these ground realities and the claims they seek to lay on legal and political categories. Bryant and Hatay (2020) argue that the TRNC’s assertions of sovereign statehood are factitious in the sense that they simultaneously establish de facto realities and struggle against their own denial. In a similar vein, refugee claims to legal status within the TRNC seek to establish facts while warding off the inherent legal contractions that come with such a claim. UNHCR’s issuance of person-of-concern letters through an NGO proxy comprises a de facto assertion of refugee law, while struggling against the implied denial of refugee status within the work-around arrangement that it has created to eschew direct engagement with the TRNC.

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the participation of all people whom we interviewed. We also thank Samuel O. Akoni, Joe Anderson, Rebecca Bryant, Théotime Chabre, Mete Hatay, Lidia Kuzemska, Marika Sosnowski, and two anonymous reviewers for conceptual and contextual inputs as well as Oğuz Haksever and Şerife Akman for assistance and translation during interviews. Finally, we thank the editors of and the contributors to this collection for support and feedback.

Funding

This study was funded by a grant from the Swedish Science Council title ‘Legal Identity under Insurgencies and Unrecognised States’ [grant number 2020-03318_3].

Notes

References