Man handed five-year sentence for smuggling migrants into Cyprus

A 24-year-old man was on Monday sentenced to five years in prison after having been found guilty of illegally smuggling people into Cyprus.

He had been arrested on April 13 last year, with the police saying he had captained an “overloaded vessel” and “aided and abetted” the arrival on the island of a number of irregular migrants, one of whom had already had their asylum claim in Cyprus rejected.

His boat’s arrival came amid a wave of migrant arrivals on the island, with the previous day having seen 141 irregular migrants, 138 of whom are of Syrian origin, arrive on the island.

Those arrivals come as good sailing weather allowed for over 800 irregular migrants to arrive on the island in the first few days of that month, while people had been arriving on the island in great number throughout the spring of 2024.

The number of irregular migrants arriving on the island has since subsided, with a a €1 billion financial support package from the European Union to Lebanon signed in May having gone some way to increasing Lebanon’s capacity to house refugees and prevent them from travelling across the Levantine Sea to Cyprus.

Meanwhile, for much of last year, one of the Cypriot government’s flagship policies related to the issue was plans to have some regions of Syria declared safeto return migrants.

However, that plan was scuppered by the European Court of Justice in October, with the court specifying that the designation of a third country as a safe country of origin must cover the country’s entire territory.

Since then, Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad has been overthrown and replaced by Ahmed al-Sharaa, with it hoped that the new status quo in Syria may offer more stability and thus naturally bring the number of migrants down.

Earlier this year, Cypriot Foreign Minister Constantinos Kombos visited Damascus to meet both al-Sharaa and his Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani with the aim of building ties, though President Nikos Christodoulides last week insisted that any lifting of international sanctions on the country will not be permanent.