On 21 March, the European Commission officially proposed changes to the Council decision establishing an emergency relocation mechanism for asylum-seekers. This change will allow the implementation of the EU-Turkey migration deal. As part of the deal, EU countries agreed to accept one Syrian refugee from Turkey for every Syrian returned to Turkey from Greece under the deal. Several EU states made it clear that this resettlement scheme must not constitute an additional obligation, beyond what had already been agreed at EU level. The EC formally proposed to amend the existing relocation decision to allow for this. The proposal states that resettlements from Turkey will be counted as part of the relocation scheme. For the time being, the EC "reserved" a number of 54,000 of the overall 160,000 relocations that the EU had agreed on. The EU-Turkey deal is already in force, each arrival in Greece will be swiftly reviewed and then returned to Turkey. Greek legislation has also been amended accordingly. First readmissions to Turkey are expected on 4 April.

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