Summary and Key Recommendations

By the end of the year, an estimated total of 1,000 unaccompanied migrant and asylum-seeking children will have entered Greece during 2008. Arriving without a parent or adult responsible for their care, many have fled countries wracked by armed conflict such as Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq. Some are fleeing persecution, violence, discrimination and exploitation. Others are running from a destiny of poverty and illiteracy. An unknown number may have been trafficked.

Many will have been caught by the authorities as they enter the country, sometimes by boat, others as they try to leave for other parts of the European Union. Yet others will have been detained by police making sweeps against migrants, such as that which took place in Patras at the start of 2008, or in action against street traders or petty criminality. A few will declare themselves through the process of applying for asylum.

These unaccompanied children are particularly vulnerable to violence, exploitation and abuse. Yet the official protection and asylum regimes fail them-migrants and asylum-seekers alike. That systemic failure is the focus of this report.

While Greek legislation recognizes, to an extent, the government's obligations to care for and protect unaccompanied migrant children, the situation on the ground is woeful. The police are responsible for virtually all aspects of immigration and asylum-including the adjudication of asylum claims in the first instance and the deportation of migrants. Yet children (and adult migrants) report being beaten, kicked or slapped by police officers and coast guards. One child told Human Rights Watch of being subjected to a mock execution by a port police officer in Patras. Others reported being thrown into the sea.

Children are routinely detained, contrary to international standards, sometimes in the same cells as adults. Procedures for assessing their age or vulnerability are totally inadequate. Children report arbitrary age assessments.

The inadequacy of identification procedures followed by police combined with the lack of trained personnel and interpreters mean that there is a serious risk that trafficked children are not recognized as such. One official declared that his detention center did not have any trafficking victims within it-but there were no interpreters employed at the center and one of the detainees, an Afghan girl, told Human Rights Watch researchers that she had not been interviewed since her arrival. One boy described how he would be kept "like a prisoner" by the man who smuggled him if his uncle back home did not pay the agreed US$6000 smuggling fee. A 16-year-old girl from the Philippines told how she had come to Athens to join "her aunt," taking up a job as a domestic worker. 

The guardianship system, the responsibility of juvenile and court prosecutors, is dysfunctional. There are no standard procedures explaining the mandate of guardians for foreign unaccompanied children, and as a result prosecutors have widely differing views of what their role entails. Some believe that they cannot act on behalf of detained children.

Only a small minority of unaccompanied children ask for asylum no matter how solid their refugee claims. Many believe they have no chances of receiving refugee status. Indeed, Greece's recognition rate of asylum-seekers after a first assessment stands at 0.03 percent.

Unaccompanied children who want to apply for asylum in Greece face serious obstacles simply accessing asylum procedures. None of the children interviewed by Human Rights Watch, many of whom are illiterate, had been orally informed by police of their right to claim asylum. Although the authorities say that applications from children can be received any day of the week, in reality, unaccompanied children are lined up with hundreds of adults outside the Petrou Ralli police station in Athens each Sunday-the main facility for processing asylum claims. Children described waiting in line overnight and returning six or seven times before finally managing to enter the building. Some told us they gave up trying to file an asylum application. During the asylum interview, few are represented by a guardian or lawyer. Unaccompanied children told of interviews lasting only a few minutes in which key information about their situation was not recorded and some were denied the chance to explain why they left their country of origin or their families.

With only one opportunity to ask for asylum in Europe under the European Union's Dublin II regulation, once children are released from detention in Greece, many attempt to travel onwards to Italy and other EU countries-often a risky and life-threatening journey. In Italy, they may find themselves summarily returned to Greece. Those who travel onwards after they made an asylum application in Greece may be transferred back under the Dublin II regulation that allows EU member states to return any asylum seeker, including unaccompanied children, to the country where they first asked for asylum.

There is a severe shortage of safe accommodation for unaccompanied foreign children. As of November 2008, the Ministry of Health funded or co-funded only around 200 places in care institutions. This is far from the number needed for children already in the country, much less for those expected to arrive in the months to come-yet the ministry has no plans to extend this provision. There is no specialized center for unaccompanied girls and no foster family system is available for unaccompanied migrant children. Indeed, the reality is that children who have not asked for asylum have less chance of accessing a care placement, and finding places for those who are seeking asylum is equally a struggle. The recent opening of a care center for up to 100 unaccompanied children on Lesvos Island is an encouraging step. However, as a large-scale center in an isolated and remote location, it is only adequate as a transit center but not for extended placement.

As a result of the lack of care places, unaccompanied children are typically released from detention with nothing but a deportation order requiring them to leave the country, but no further assistance. If they fail to leave the country and do not apply for asylum, or otherwise fail to access or fall out of the asylum procedures, they are subject to renewed arrest and detention and at risk of deportation.

Most find themselves without accommodation and therefore sleep in parks, share apartments with adult strangers, or otherwise find overcrowded and squalid accommodation, such as over-crowded "hotels," typically decrepit buildings in the center of Athens where spots to sleep on the floor are rented out for three to five euro a night.

Forced to fend for themselves, children struggle daily for survival, are out of school and have to search for income as day laborers. As a result, they are at serious risk of ending up illegally employed in exploitative work, performing heavy and hazardous tasks at risk to their health.

The protection failures documented in this report represent the continuation in 2008 of systemic failures which have led to criticism and concern expressed by both UN and Greek bodies over many previous years. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child expressed concern about the treatment of unaccompanied migrant and asylum-seeking children as long ago as 2002. In 2004, the UN Human Rights Committee noted an "absence of child welfare protection." In 2005, the Greek Ombudsman called on the government to identify, register, and provide adequate care to all unaccompanied children in the country-a call basically repeated by the Greek National Commission for Human Rights in 2007.   

Key Recommendations

To the Government of Greece

Greece needs to revise its entire system and services to protect unaccompanied migrant and asylum seeking children:

• The Ministry of Health and Social Solidarity should increase the number of care places for unaccompanied children to the level required to ensure placements for all unaccompanied children in the country. In cooperation with the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Health should set up a registration and tracking system in Greece to account for every child. It should also design programs to reach out to unaccompanied migrant children who live outside state-sponsored care and facilitate their access to state protection.  
• The Ministry of Interior should grant unaccompanied children a regular status for as long as they are on Greek territory to ensure their enjoyment of rights and protection on an equal basis with Greek children, and to protect them from repeated arrest and detention. In cooperation with the Ministry of Health, it should establish a functioning system to refer all unaccompanied migrant children to care places and specialized services. The Ministry of Interior should further suspend the deportation of unaccompanied children until the adoption of revised legislation that ensures children's safe return and integration in the country of origin in accordance with their best interests.

• The Greek government should revise the current temporary guardianship system for unaccompanied migrant children. It should ensure that sufficient and trained guardians are available to carry out their duties and safeguard children's best interests in a responsible manner.
• Police and other government officials should condemn ill-treatment of child and other migrants and asylum seekers at the hand of state agents. They should also ensure prompt and full investigation of such acts including disciplinary or penal accountability of those found responsible.
• The Greek government should overhaul its asylum system by improving access to asylum procedures, guaranteeing fairer and more effective determinations, training for adjudicators on child-specific persecution, and effective legal representation throughout the asylum procedure, in order to ensure that children who flee persecution as well as those who cannot return due to humanitarian reasons, violence, or the risk of ill-treatment and exploitation, are permitted to stay in accordance with their entitlements under international law. Children who are not permitted to stay should not be deported until safeguards are in place to ensure that a return is in their best interests and poses no danger to their well-being and safety.

To European Union Member States

·Suspend all transfers of unaccompanied children to Greece under the Dublin II regulation until such time as Greece's asylum systems and protection services for unaccompanied children meet international standards.

To the European Commission

·Recognize that the European asylum instruments and the Dublin II regulation do not guarantee sufficient protection for unaccompanied children in the European Union; start negotiations on a separate and comprehensive legal instrument for all unaccompanied children in the European Union.

Methodology and Scope

This report addresses the treatment of unaccompanied children who seek asylum or who migrate to Greece. With the exception of deportations, it does not address unaccompanied children who enter Greece from Albania, as a series of reports by other organizations has been published in the past eight years on their situation.[1] Neither does this report document conditions in detention or in care centers, which are discussed in a separate Human Rights Watch report entitled Greece-Stuck in a Revolving Door: Iraqis and other Asylum seekers and Migrants at the Greece-Turkey Entrance Gate to the European Union.This report does not repeat these findings and instead only refers to conclusions documented in the second report.[2] 

Research was carried out in Greece from April 14-16 and from May 21 to June 12. Ninety-nine migrants and asylum seekers, among them 53 unaccompanied children, were interviewed-three of them girls. Thirty-seven children were from Afghanistan, 10 were from Somalia, 2 were from Iraq, and the remaining 4 were from Congo-Brazzaville, the Philippines, Nigeria, and Pakistan. Twenty-two children, including all three girls, were below age 16, and the remaining were 16 or 17 years old.[3] 

Many children did not know their exact date of birth, and all were told that they could be interviewed regardless of their age. In two cases, we concluded after the interview that the persons interviewed were most likely 18 or older; one young-looking girl did not want to tell us her age. We did not count these individuals as children.

We conducted a majority of interviews with the help of interpreters. We interviewed migrants and asylum seekers in four detention centers and in the following locations: Athens, Volos, Patras, Samos Island, Mitilini, Hagius Andreas.[4]  In Athens, we found children with the help of members of migrant communities as well as through human rights defenders. In Volos, we interviewed unaccompanied children at a care center for boys. In Patras, we interviewed unaccompanied children staying at an informal settlement. We also interviewed children shortly after their release from detention in Mitilini, while traveling on a ferry to Athens.

Interviews conducted in Athens, on the ferry, and in the care center were fully private and confidential. Interviews in most cases lasted around 45 minutes, and in some cases up to one and half hours. Interviews in detention centers were generally much shorter. While those interviews were carried out away from staff, other detainees might have been able to hear the conversation. Also, with few exceptions, interviews in Patras were not conducted fully in private; often, conversations were listened to by other migrants who lived in the informal settlement.

In Greece we met with police officials, staff working with the Prefectures, representatives from the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Interior, the Greek Ombudsman, the National Commission for Human Rights, the Greek office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, non-governmental organizations, and human rights lawyers and activists.

All names of children interviewed have been replaced by pseudonyms to protect their identity. In some instances, we also withhold the child's country of origin, or the exact date and location of the interview in order to avoid the possibility of identifying the child. Some names of staff who work with unaccompanied children have also been withheld to protect them from possible repercussions for the information shared.

In line with international instruments, the term "child" refers to a person under the age of 18.[5] For the purpose of this report, we use the term "unaccompanied child" to describe both unaccompanied and separated children as defined by the Committee on the Rights of the Child: "'Unaccompanied children' are children, as defined in article 1 of the Convention, who have been separated from both parents and other relatives and are not being cared for by an adult who, by law or custom, is responsible for doing so. 'Separated children' are children, as defined in article 1 of the Convention, who have been separated from both parents, or from their previous legal or customary primary caregiver, but not necessarily from other relatives. These may, therefore, include children accompanied by other adult family members."[6]