Athens, Greece – Greece has drawn criticism and concern from rights groups and a United Nations office after passing what it considers to be the European Union’s strictest refugee deportation policy earlier this month.
The law was put to use on September 12, when three Turkish citizens were convicted of illegal residence and handed stiff jail sentences. Two men were given two years of imprisonment and fines of 5,000 euros ($5,870), while the third, aged 19, the youngest of the group, was handed a 10-month prison sentence.
Recommended Stories
list of 3 itemsend of list
Athens plans to test-drive the law through a likely minefield of legal challenges in the coming months. Humanitarian organisations say the measure unfairly includes children and stigmatises refugees and migrants as criminals.
Greek Minister for Migration and Asylum Thanos Plevris told Parliament on September 2 that the law was “the strictest returns policy in the whole EU” and claimed there was “a lot of interest from European countries, especially EU members, to adopt this law as a law that will force an illegal migrant to return”.
Rights groups, which are gearing up to challenge the legislation, say it far outshoots a draft Returns Regulation the European Commission wants to make binding on all member states by June 2026.
The new law has shortened deadlines and raised penalties for unauthorised residence.
For example, rejected asylum applicants will be fitted with ankle monitors and given just two weeks to remove themselves voluntarily. If they do not, they face, like the two Turkish nationals, a 5,000-euro ($5,870) fine and between two and five years of confinement in closed camps.
Children, more than a fifth of arrivals this year, are not exempt. If people wish to appeal, they have to do it in four days.
“We always claim that it’s not legal to put children in detention,” said Federica Toscano from Save the Children. The law is “not aligned with the [UN] Convention on the Rights of the Child”, and is “absolutely challengeable”.
The Greek Ombudsman, an independent authority monitoring public services, also objected to the law’s maximum reprieve of 60 days, down from 120, so children can complete their school year.
The Ombudsman suggested the law sets out to prove the proposition that all undocumented people are criminals.
Ankle monitors, it said, which are not mentioned in the draft Returns Regulation, “deepen the view of migrants as criminals and put their treatment on a par with that reserved for indictees, convicts and prisoners on leave”.
“Refugees are entitled to effective access to international protection without punishment for violating migration policy,” says the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Under the Geneva Convention, “the quest for asylum … is not a criminal offence, but a human right”.
The EU approves about 45 percent of asylum applications on average.
Of the remainder, 90 percent end up staying on European soil because there is no effective policy to return them, say European officials.
“Without a returns policy, no migration policy has any meaning,” said Greece’s then-migration minister, Makis Voridis, presenting the new proposals in Parliament’s European Affairs Committee on May 15.
Irregular entry into the country has been raised to a felony. Anyone arriving without documents can be detained for two years, up from 18 months.
A provision that legalises anyone after seven years of undocumented residence is being abolished.
Greece’s predicament
Plevris has defended the hardened law, arguing that Greece guards external EU borders.
“It’s easy to defend borders when there’s three or four countries people have to cross to get to you. Compare us to other first reception countries,” he said.
Since 2015, Greece has been the arrival point of 46 percent of more than 2.8 million undocumented people entering Europe, according to UNHCR.
Many have moved on to other EU member states, but because of EU rules, rejected asylum seekers or asylum recipients who lose their protected status would be returned to their country of arrival in the EU for deportation.
Greek officials admit they do not expect refugees and migrants to spend five years in detention. The draconian rules, they say, are designed to force them to return voluntarily once they are convicted.
That is because it is legally difficult to deport anyone forcibly.
The law has a second aim – to deter what Greece views as so-called economic migrants travelling to Europe when there are Geneva Convention signatories closer to home.
“It’s a massive programme that costs a lot of money and involves a whole web of private actors. So I think that would be pretty difficult to set up,” said Hope Barker, who works for the Global Strategic Communications Council, a nongovernmental group seeking to influence environmental and migration policy.
Greece’s Union of Administrative Judges objected that the law did not define flight risk, leaving incarceration decisions to the discretion of the police. The law “needs to provide a comprehensive list of criteria, not an indicative one”, it said.
The Council of Bar Associations of Greece also weighed in with objections to tightened deadlines for appeal and the criminalisation of undocumented entry.
“Danger to life and limb vastly outranks whatever law is broken by entering Greece illegally,” it said.
The EU’s guinea pig?
Repeatedly, these bodies pointed out, the new law violates the existing EU Returns Regulation, which dates back to 2008, but observers of EU migration policy say the European Commission is deliberately allowing Greece to push the boundaries.
“Greece has become something of a testing ground for many EU measures, especially on the Greek islands,” Amnesty International’s Olivia Sundberg told Al Jazeera, citing the Closed Controlled Access Centres built to house thousands of asylum seekers.
“In a lot of ways, Greece is a place that has tested things out before they became EU law, and if they worked well, they were carried over into [EU] directives,” she said.
The EU is now looking for ways to implement returns.
“There is this whole push for what they call ‘innovative solutions’,” said Barker. “So one of these is obviously return hubs in third countries, another is getting people to sign up to voluntary returns,” she told Al Jazeera.
Italy has been testing third-country hubs through a deal with Albania, but Italian courts have ordered some of the asylum seekers sent there for processing returned to Italy.
Greece’s law casts a wider net, suggesting returnees should seek protection in any safe country closer to their country of origin.
But Greece’s Ombudsman has objected to this.
Passing the burden “allows a return process to a country the returnee doesn’t come from, or hasn’t passed through and has no connection to, except that it is geographically close to his country of origin. In this case, it’s no longer a ‘returns’ procedure but a ‘displacement’ procedure”, the Ombudsman said.
Some observers say Europe is in danger of falling short of its own human rights charter.
“Migration is becoming a rule of law issue rather than an implementation of law issue,” said Amnesty’s Sundberg.
Others point out that Europe is an ageing continent in need of more workers to sustain its tax base and social security systems in the coming decades.
“How are we going to create an environment of reception of the people we need, when we take this type of measure?” asked Lefteris Papayiannakis, who heads the Greek Council for Refugees, a legal aid charity. “If you can’t attract them, what’s your next move?”
Besides, he said, the measures exude desperation.
“You’re creating an impression now that you’re not in control. But if we compare the situation now with 2015, or the [flight of] Ukrainians in 2022, it’s a completely different situation,” Papayiannakis said.
