Human rights community decries new Greek asylum law
Athens, Greece - A new
asylum law has passed in Athens, amid acrimonious debate and a storm of
withering criticism from Greek and international aid organisations.
The three-month-old
conservative New Democracy government said on Thursday the law will bring
much-needed speed and efficiency to Greece's bogged-down asylum process.
Critics, however, say it
breaks European and international humanitarian law and creates a monstrous
mechanism that will likely condemn deserving asylum applicants to deportation
and death.
The United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said the law "puts an excessive
burden on asylum seekers and focuses on punitive measures. It introduces tough
requirements that an asylum seeker could not reasonably be expected to
fulfil."
European Commissioner for
Human Rights Dunja Mijatovic on Thursday said she fully supported the aid
groups. "I really join my voice to their voice when it comes to concerns
in relation to the draft law," she said.
'Institutional magnet'
New Democracy was supported
by the Socialist party to garner 180 votes in the 300-seat parliament. The
left-wing Syriza party, the Communist party, the right-wing Greek Solution
party and the party of former left-wing finance minister Yanis Varoufakis all voted
against.
Former Prime Minister
Alexis Tsipras lashed out at New Democracy for what he said was
institutionalisation of pushbacks - illegal returns of applicants without
examining their claims for protection.
"'Let's protect our
maritime borders from the invasion. Let's look into deterrence at sea. Even
pushbacks aren't a bad idea. Let's make these people understand that their life
in Greece will be harder than wherever they're coming from.' These are the
sorts of things your MPs and officials used to say and still say," said
Tsipras, who leads the left-wing Syriza party, which governed Greece for the
four years until July 2019.
Deputy Citizens' Protection
Minister George Koumoutsakos struck back: "Your law brought 75,000 asylum
applications, which we inherited, thousands of people who are waiting, which is
not humanitarian, a zero-rate of returns [to Turkey], which exposed us to
criticism from Europe, and a law that worked not to control or deter, but as a
huge institutional magnet."
Greece is under extreme
pressure due to increased migratory flows from Turkey. It has received more than 45,000
potential asylum-seekers this year, representing 60 percent of migrants who
have crossed the Mediterranean. It is processing 11 percent of all the European Union's asylum applications - seven
times its fair share under EU rules.
While it has sent 32,000
asylum-seekers to other EU members in the past three years, the relocation
mechanism under which most went was temporary. For the past two years, Greece
has been responsible for processing all new arrivals and has more than 88,000
applications for asylum or international protection on file. Reception centres
on its Aegean islands built for 6,000 people are now overflowing with a record
35,000 people.
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The government believes the
new law will allow it to filter disingenuous asylum seekers from true refugees
before they enter the bogged-down asylum system.
"The migration issue
is a big problem. You're right to call it a migration issue. The refugee issue
is a very small part of it. The migration issue is the bigger of the two,"
foreign minister Nikos Dendias recently told a radio host. Government spokesman
Stelios Petsas called it "the country's biggest social problem".
"The previous [Syriza]
government had a welcome policy that allowed hundreds of thousands to cross the
border," says New Democracy MP Maximos Harakopoulos, who heads the
parliamentary committee that screened the bill. "They thought migrants sun
themselves and then move on. At some point, central European countries felt the
pressure from their societies and that's how we got fences erected on our
northern border," he told Al Jazeera.
"We want to separate
who is really a refugee and who is an economic migrant, from Africa to
Pakistan," Harakopoulos added.
The government believes
that, in addition to putting the asylum process beyond the reach of unqualified
applicants, the law will help it deport 10,000 unqualified asylum seekers next
year. That is five times more than Greece deported in the three years under an
EU-Turkey agreement.
A faulty
design?
Human rights lawyers say
the law's provisions chip away at the spirit of international humanitarian law
and the EU's Asylum Procedures Directive.
For instance, the law
introduces a series of "cooperation duties", such as regularly
reporting to authorities or informing them of changes of address. These act as
bureaucratic trap-doors, lawyers say, leading to automatic rejection.
Human rights lawyers also
say the law introduces fast-track procedures, including for children. These
lift protection from deportation for those who are rejected in the first
instance, even if they appeal, which the UNHCR says introduces a danger of
refoulment - sending a potential refugee back into a hazardous environment.
"Even the articles of
the law that appear to integrate the [EU Asylum Procedures] Directive, taken in
sum, produce the opposite effect to what the Directive intends," says
Alexandros Konstantinou of the Greek Council for Refugees, a respected legal
aid group that has helped tens of thousands of people over 30 years.
For instance, the law
increases incarceration for refugees from three to 18 months. It does not count
children born outside a refugee's country of origin as family members. And it
attempts to define which countries are safe for refugees to return to, even
though this may change from day-to-day or case-to-case.
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The most stringent new
provisions are in the appeals process. As of January, the UNHCR will lose its
seat on appeals committees. Appealants will face a panel of three judges
instead. And they will be given a tight deadline of up to five days to file an
appeal.
"The law obliges the
state to provide you with legal aid, but last year only one in five appealants
got a lawyer," says Konstantinou. "Yet the law requires you to fill
out an affidavit in Greek explaining the substantive and legal reasons why
you're appealing. That effectively excludes a lot of people."
Greece never won plaudits
for the conditions in which migrants and refugees survive on its soil. On the
contrary, its failure to provide EU-funded healthcare and decent nutrition is
currently under investigation by the EU's anti-corruption authority.
Ever since it was founded
in 2013, however, the Greek Asylum Service has been hailed as an institutional
and moral success. Now Greece risks going back to a dark period when the police
ran its asylum system and the European Court of Human Rights allowed applicants
to have their cases heard in other EU states, because the Greek system was
considered too unprofessional.
Lawyers suggest the new
regime may never get off the ground. "This law will raise so many issues
it's going to be challenged in national and international courts. Past
precedent suggests that it won't stand up to international refugee law,"
says Konstantinou.
"There were two ways
to solve [the crisis on islands]," he says. "One was to reinforce the
system, have more capacity, and move people faster through the system while
maintaining a high standard … the other way is to deprive people of the ability
to apply, and exclude large groups … this law clearly took the second
choice."
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