Refugees in Greece want to be arrested to claim asylum

HUNDREDS of migrants and refugees camped outside a police station in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city, yesterday, waiting to be arrested so they can formally lodge their asylum applications.

Around 11,000 refugees and migrants have crossed the frontier from Turkey so far this year, compared with 2,500 last year. More than half of the asylum seekers reaching Greece are women and children, according to the UN Refugee Agency.

A few hundred asylum seekers, many of them from Iraq and Iran, have been sleeping rough in parks and squares in Thessaloniki for days.

But with winter weather approaching they are anxious to submit their asylum requests and be transferred to migrant camps.

Since countries such as Macedonia, Serbia and Hungary closed their borders to refugees in 2016, around 60,000 asylum seekers have been stuck in limbo in Greece, with efforts to resettle them in other EU member states stalled.

That number is growing all the time as new arrivals come from Turkey, either crossing the land border between the two countries or taking small boats to Aegean Islands such as Lesbos, Kos and Samos.

The land border has become more popular as the camps on the islands become increasingly crowded, with migrants facing squalid conditions and frequent fights between rival nationalities.

“This is not the Europe that the world imagines,” Kumi Naidoo, the secretary-general of Amnesty International, said last week during a visit to Moria, the largest camp on Lesbos. “The conditions are appalling.”