Report slams north for ‘trapping’ university students, who enrol

Asian and African international students are falling prey to the ‘north Cyprus trap’, encountering several abuses the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

According to FT, in recent years there has been a surge in new projects in the north, with the region now hosting 23 universities, with several more under construction. Most of them are privately owned.

Analysts told the newspaper that the sector is the main engine of the small Turkish Cypriot economy, although there is no official GDP data.

Yodak, northern Cyprus’s higher education regulator, puts the student population at about 100,000 — somewhere between 10 and 20 per cent of the entire population, as the total number of inhabitants is disputed. Half the students come from Turkey and 40 per cent arrive from other countries. The rest are local.

Analysts and human rights groups warn that parts of the business have become mired in fraud and human rights abuses as students fall prey to exploitation.

The Financial Times said agents for some institutions have also been accused of fuelling illegal immigration into Europe, as would-be asylum seekers and other migrants enrol as students before being smuggled across the Green Line — the UN buffer that separates the island’s two zones — into the neighbouring EU state.

“International students, particularly from African and Asian countries, are especially vulnerable to human trafficking,” Deniz Altiok, anti-trafficking co-ordinator at Turkish-Cypriot NGO the Human Rights Platform, told the Financial Times.

“They fall victim to forced labour as well as sexual exploitation.”

This year’s US State Department Trafficking in Persons report warned of widespread workplace abuse of students in the north among those who have jobs, including confiscation of passports by unlicensed moneylenders and coercion into forced labour.

The government said some university applicants in the north are “ghost students” whose aim is to cross into the Republic of Cyprus and seek asylum. People-smuggling networks operate on both sides of the divide, according to local researchers.

Nicholas Ioannides, deputy migration minister, said Cyprus could not handle so many migrants, adding that Turkey “must provide those individuals access to asylum procedures” and that Cyprus should not bear the burden for Turkey’s failure to comply with international law.