Human Rights Watch calls on the new government in Greece to take urgent steps to end abuses against refugees and migrants, including children.

An estimated 150 unaccompanied migrant children being held in a detention center on Lesvos Island were on a hunger strike for four days to protest their living conditions.

Human Rights Watch received reports from a credible source that, in mid-July 2009, police transferred a group of Arabic-speaking people from Chios Island to the Evros border region, where some were secretly forced to cross the border into Turkey.

The Greek government has come up with a novel solution to a growing backlog of asylum appeals: Abolish appeals.  No backlog. No Problem.

Greek authorities are arresting large numbers of migrants and asylum seekers in the country's cities and islands and moving many of them to the north, raising fears of illegal expulsions to Turkey.

Greece is on the European Union frontline, and needs closer co-operation with the EU to protect the union's external borders. But rather than co-operation based on high standards and mutual respect, it appears that other EU member states are all too willing to look the other way as Greece performs their dirty work of keeping migrants out.

Hundreds of unaccompanied children in Greece are fleeing from war-torn countries in a desperate search for safety, they end up in a daily struggle for survival. They work in dangerous jobs, live in squalid and unsafe places, or simply beg and sleep in parks or cardboard shacks. Worse, Greek police officials often arrest and ill-treat these children, and the chances that Greece will recognise them as refugees are close to zero.

Some 1,000 unaccompanied migrant children who have entered Greece in 2008 without parents or caregivers struggle to survive without any state assistance.