The term of “travel document for the Palestinians” prevailed in the Turkish government circles of not being listed in its system, thus this caused a state of uncertainty in dealing with the file, as an outcome of the fact that the Syrian-Palestinian does not treated similarly as to the Syrian, noting that the refugee’s papers are completely Official Syrian papers . Therefore they have no residencies, while the clinics, hospitals and non-official sides deal with them similarly as to the Syrians.
In February 2014, Palestinian civilian institutions have managed to make some improvements in the file of the Palestinians in Syria with the Turkish government, such as the Palestinian Return Centre, the AGPS, in addition to the Turkish Assembly for Solidarity with Palestine (Vidar). This was resulted in the issuance of a decision, on 19th of Feb.2014, that allows the Palestinians, who entered the country illegally, to obtain “status settlement”;an entry stamp with a six months or a year residency.
The Turkish government has stipulated that this decision is to be done in coordination with the Palestinian official level represented with the Palestinian Embassy in Ankara, which went on the implementation of this resolution.
However, the first batch of those who applied for a “status settlement” took seven months to get a settlement, thus the residencies have reached semi-finished, and they were distributed to various provinces, which caused prohibitive material cost represented in travel for the entire family more than once to complete the transaction, preventing some of them of completing it. Furthermore, the medium cost for the family, with the rest of the transaction costs of translation, ratification, and health insurance, has reached thousands of dollars, while the second batch of applicants did not get “the settlement of the situation”, and still wait until the moment of preparing the report.
The Turkish government has dealt with residencies through a branches of the so-called “Securities”; a security point of the Interior Ministry, and that was until the beginning of August 2014, where new laws package were issued that will transfer this entire file to a new management was developed for this purpose; which is the General Directorate of Immigration. This was a direct result of progress in the negotiations between Turkey and the European Union to resolve the refugee file against granting the Turkish citizens the right to enter Europe without a visa.
Among the details of this agreement that Turkey announcement, on the 1st of September 2014, a date for accession to the European fingerprint database, so that the thumbprint is linked to the Bank of the European information system. The fingerprints, of those who applied for an asylum residency in Turkey, will be included, after the date mentioned above, to the European database, the thing that will allow the European countries to return those back to Turkey later.
The results of these developments and their impact on the legal status of the Syrians in general, and the Palestinian Syrians in particular, were not accurately reflected yet, and everyone is still waiting for more executive detailed explanations.
Generally, what was supposed above indicates that the Syrian will be free to choose between the tourism and the humanitarian residency, as the humanitarian residency will be subjected to the negotiations development between Turkey and the EU
According to eyewitnesses, the Syrian-Palestinians, who hold Syrian travel document, will not benefit from the new decisions, and will be treated as in the past, therefore, will not grant the mentioned above residencies.
Conversely, the Palestinian Syrians will manage to obtain better legal status in case of entering into the Turkish territory using (PA passport), as they will be treated in a different way that enables them, according to the foreigners law, to obtain a tourism residency for a year, in addition to the ease of obtaining a tourist visa before.