Human rights emergency on Greek border

For your interest, we reproduce the following M&C news:

Greece has a human rights emergency on its hands, the European Union rights agency said in a report published Tuesday, which detailed the country’s failure to handle the large flow of illegal migrants even with the help of the EU.

The Vienna-based EU Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) said that ‘there is no evidence of a comprehensive emergency response to address the conditions in the detention centres despite the availability of EU funds.’

Last year, 90 per cent of migrants who entered the European Union illegally did so through the Greek land and sea borders, with the largest groups coming from Albania and Afghanistan.

The report described severely overcrowded detention centres in the eastern region of Evros near the Turkish border. In the Soufli centre, FRA experts witnessed 144 people held in a room of about 110 square metres on a day in January.

‘There is a complete absence of independent social and legal counselling, apart from periodic visits by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees,’ the agency said, adding that many migrants are not aware why they are being detained.

Also, vulnerable migrants such as children, pregnant women or victims of violence are not being adequately identified at the border and are held under inhumane conditions.

‘The situation at the EU’s external land border between Greece and Turkey constitutes a fundamental rights emergency,’ FRA director Morten Kjaerum said in a statement.

The report noted the various bodies and ministries responsible for dealing with migrants work together only based on informal lines.

‘By contrast, no coordination mechanisms appear to exist between ministries at operational level,’ it said.

Since 2008, Greece has been granted 16.9 million euros (23.5 million dollars) in EU emergency funds.

However, the FRA said it ‘found no evidence that these resources are used to improve the current situation at the Evros border,’ except for a medical programme started in February and a forthcoming legal aid programme by the United Nations.

The report acknowledged that Greece came up with an action plan last August, that it is receiving help from the EU’s border agency FRONTEX, and that authorities are pinning their hopes on a new law published in January that reforms the asylum system.

But the FRA said the government was busy with implementing the law, rather with addressing the immediate humanitarian situation at the border.

Greece urgently needs practical support from outside on coordinating its action on the ground and in how to make use of EU funding, the rights body said.