migration control deal between EU and Turkey agreed in March. The International Organization for Migration estimated that a record 5,000 people died at sea compared to around 3,700 last year. The EU-Turkey deal was the EU’s signature response to the so-called “refugee crisis”. Turkey was offered €6 billion to police its coastline and accept the return of asylumseekers who made it across to the Greek islands. The deal was premised on the untrue assertion that Turkey offered asylum-seekers all the protections they would be entitled to in the EU. With a barely functioning asylum system in place, and nearly three million Syrian refugees already struggling to get by, the claim stood testimony to the EU’s willingness to ignore the rights and livelihoods of refugees to suit its political purposes. Even though the numbers of new arrivals slowed to a few thousand a month on average, the reception capacity on the Greek islands was still severely stretched. By the end of the year, some 12,000 refugees and asylum-seekers were stranded there in increasingly overcrowded, insanitary and dangerous conditions in makeshift centres. The poor conditions periodically sparked riots within the camps, while some were attacked by locals accused of links to far right groups. Conditions for the around 50,000 refugees and migrants on the Greek mainland were only marginally better. By the end of the year, most had found shelter in official reception facilities. However, these mostly consisted of tents and abandoned warehouses and were unsuitable for accommodation for more than a few days. As the year drew to a close, the EU-Turkey deal remained in place, but looked increasingly fragile. By then it was clear, however, that it was only a first line of defence. The second initiative to stop people arriving in Europe was the closure of the Balkan route above Greece in March. Macedonia and successive Balkan countries were prevailed upon to close their borders and assisted in the task by border guards from different European countries. The move was initially championed by Hungarian Prime Amnesty International Report 2016/17 Minister Viktor Orbán, then taken up by Austria. For many EU leaders, the misery of refugees trapped in Greece was clearly a price worth paying to discourage more from coming. The lack of solidarity with refugees and fellow EU member states was typical of the migration policies of most EU countries, which united in their plans to restrict entry and expedite return. This became apparent in the failure of the EU’s flagship relocation scheme. Adopted by EU heads of state in September, with a view to distributing the responsibility for receiving the large number of refugees arriving in a small number of countries, the plan foresaw the relocation of 120,000 people from Italy, Greece and Hungary across the EU within two years. After Hungary rejected the scheme, figuring it would be better off simply closing its borders altogether, its quota was reallocated to Greece and Italy. By the end of the year, only around 6,000 people had been relocated from Greece and just under 2,000 from Italy. The relocation scheme was coupled with another EU initiative from 2015: the “hotspot approach”. This EU Commission-inspired plan foresaw large processing centres in Italy and Greece to identify and fingerprint new arrivals, swiftly assess their protection needs and either process their asylum applications, relocate them to other EU countries or return them to their country of origin (or for those arriving in Greece, to Turkey). With the relocation component of the plan effectively falling away, Italy and Greece were left facing enormous pressure to fingerprint, process and return as many migrants as possible. There were incidents of ill-treatment being used to secure fingerprints, arbitrary detention of migrants and collective expulsions. In August, a group of 40 people, many from Darfur, were returned to Sudan shortly after a Memorandum of Understanding was signed by Italian and Sudanese police. Upon arrival in Sudan, the migrants were interrogated by the Sudanese National Intelligence and Security Service, an agency implicated in serious human rights violations. 41