“I feel trapped. I can’t go back or forward,” said Saaman, a 30-year-old actor from Iran I met last week at Elliniko, one of the temporary reception facilities for asylum seekers and migrants that Greek authorities have set up in and around Athens. Saaman is among thousands of asylum seekers and migrants stuck in Greece, including hundreds who were bussed back to Athens last week after the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia closed its border, in November, to all but a handful of nationalities.
In Athens, authorities are struggling to find facilities to temporarily house people turned away from the border, amid growing concerns that thousands more asylum seekers and migrants will remain trapped in Greece. Despite reforms, chronic deficiencies in the Greek asylum system remain, including inadequate reception conditions for asylum seekers, hurdles to integration, and asylum approval rates that lag far behind the European Union average – 15 percent on first instance decisions on asylum applications for Greece, compared with 45 per cent for the EU in 2014.
The growing pressure on Greece to take on responsibility for large numbers of asylum seekers and migrants exposes the country to a disproportionate burden for assessing claims of those entering the EU. But above all, it carries a real risk that people like Saaman, who said he ran afoul of Iranian authorities when he refused to act in government-sponsored plays, won’t have a meaningful chance of getting the protection they need.
The EU pledged yesterday to spend 80 million euros on a housing scheme for migrants and asylum seekers stranded in Greece. But this is not enough. On Thursday, EU leaders will meet to discuss the refugee crisis. The European Commission is already pushing Greece to improve its reception capacities with the aim to resume returns of asylum seekers to Greece under the Dublin Regulation formula, according to which the EU country of first arrival should be responsible for processing the asylum claim. That approach has already been shown not only to be unfair to the EU countries on the outer margins of the EU – with the least capacity to handle large flows of asylum seekers – but unworkable as well.
Rather than reverting to a failed system, the EU now more than ever needs to act collectively to ensure a more equitable share of responsibilities that would give people like Saaman access to fair asylum procedures and humane reception conditions.
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