A Broken Asylum System
For asylum seekers able to establish a foothold in Greece, overcoming the barriers to lodge an asylum claim can be daunting. Every Friday night, hundreds of asylum seekers line up outside the Petrou Ralli police station in Athens to seek an asylum interview. But most are turned away, with many coming back week after week in a fruitless attempt simply to register a refugee claim.
For those who get an interview, cursory treatment is the norm. Hamed fled Afghanistan alone at age 13 when a local warlord threatened to kill him if he did not submit “for dancing and more,” he told Human Rights Watch. His asylum interview took place in 2008 in a noisy, crowded room in the Petrou Ralli police station.
“The policeman in civilian clothes asked something and the Iranian woman [an interpreter] told me I should say I came for a better life,” he recalled. “I don’t know whether the police officer said that or not, because I didn’t understand him. I told the Iranian woman that I wanted to explain my other problems. At that point, the police officer shouted at me and I got scared. ...”
Hamed’s interview lasted all of five minutes.
It is hardly surprising then that Greece recognizes less than 1 percent of asylum claims, treating most refugees as illegal migrants liable to detention and deportation rather than giving them the required international protection.
Nearly 20,000 new asylum applications were lodged in Greece in 2008. EU law, under the so-called “Dublin II rules,” obliges an asylum seeker entering the EU to file an asylum claim in the first country he or she enters (the system is slightly different for children). The rule allows other EU member states to send asylum seekers who entered through Greek borders back to Greece.
The government’s rejection of the vast majority of asylum applications means appeals have been growing faster than the system’s capacity to keep up. In the summer of 2009, about 30,000 asylum cases were pending. A part-time asylum appeals board heard about 60 cases a week. At that rate, it would have taken about 10 years to clear the existing backlog alone; but with virtually all cases denied in the first interview, the backlog was bound to grow.
Rather than try to solve this problem, Greece made it worse. Presidential Decree 81/2009 spreads the job of interviewing asylum seekers to police directorates throughout the country, where officers have a host of other duties and lack training in asylum law or in conducting interviews with fearful and traumatized asylum seekers.
More important, the decree abolished the right to lodge an appeal and eliminated the asylum appeals board (after it finishes the cases currently before it). What remains is strictly limited judicial review on points of law only. As a result, the Greek office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has withdrawn its cooperation on the new asylum procedure, saying that it does “not sufficiently guarantee efficiency and fairness.”