Court ruling will fast-track new migrants to Greek mainland
REFUGEES and migrants who cross by boat from Turkey to Greece’s Aegean Islands must be allowed to travel on to the mainland, a Greek court has ruled, raising concerns about a fresh wave of asylum seekers to Europe.
The ruling – which comes two years after border closures and a controversial deal with Turkey shut down the Balkan migration route – could act as an incentive for refugees, including Syrians fleeing attacks by regime forces, to head for Greece with the aim of reaching northern Europe.
The decision was met with fury, however, by the 15,000 asylum seekers who have been stuck in camps on the islands for up to two years.
The ruling does not apply retrospectively and so they will not be allowed to leave until their applications have been considered – a tortuous process.
Under the ruling new arrivals may be able to effectively jump the queue and go straight to the mainland.
Protests and riots have broken out in the camps in the past amid rising tensions with authorities.
“These people have already been exposed to extreme levels of suffering and they have received this news with anger and indignation,” said Luca Fontana, a member of Medecins Sans Frontieres who works on Lesbos, where the Moria migrant camp holds three times more people than it was built for.
“This decision only applies to the new arrivals and not to the thousands of people who have been trapped for months, sometimes years, on the Greek islands.”
The ruling by Greece’s highest administrative court, the Council of State, affects asylum seekers who reach the Aegean Islands of Lesbos, Samos, Kos, Chios, Rhodes and Leros.
The court found no “serious and overriding reasons of public interest and migration policy to justify the imposition of restriction on movement” of asylum seekers, and said that newly arrived refugees must not be detained in squalid, overcrowded camps on the holiday islands but allowed to continue by ferry to the port of Piraeus, near Athens.
There is now concern about whether migration centres on the Greek mainland will be able to handle a fresh influx of people.
‘These people [in the Aegean Islands refugee camps] have received this news with anger and indignation’
“Without co-ordination, alongside systems in place to host these refugees in accommodation on the mainland, the risk is real that we would once again see thousands of refugees camped out at Piraeus port, homeless and with nowhere to go,” said Jana Frey of the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian organisation.
In Brussels, an EU official told Reuters the court’s decision was “a big worry”.
While the number of asylum seekers crossing to the Aegean Islands is nowhere near the peak of the crisis in 2105, arrivals have increased in recent months. They are up 27 per cent this year compared with the same period in 2017.