“The situation of migrants, including asylum seekers, in the Greek Aegean islands [...] is explosive”, warned Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatović after a five-day visit to the camps in Lesbos, Samos, and Corinth.
“The situation [...] has dramatically worsened over the past [...] months”, she noted before denouncing a “desperate lack of medical care and sanitation in the vastly overcrowded camps”.
She added, “People queue for hours to get food and to go to bathrooms, when these are available. On Samos, families are chipping away at rocks to make some space on steep hillsides to set up their makeshift shelters, often made from trees they cut themselves. This no longer has anything to do with the reception of asylum seekers. This has become a struggle for survival.”
Ms Mijatović urges Greece and the European Union to better support local populations, whose frustration with this “untenable” situation is “undeniable”. She calls on the Greek authorities to take “urgent measures to meet the vital needs” of migrants. Otherwise, she adds, “these abysmal conditions, combined with existing tensions, risk leading to further tragic events”.
Currently, 34,000 migrants are spread across five islands whose total reception capacity is 6,300 people.
While the Commissioner praises the Greek government’s decision to transfer 20,000 migrants from the islands to the mainland by the end of the year, she stresses that “without lifting the geographical restriction”—which forces migrants to wait on site for the response to their asylum application—this plan will not be sufficient.
At the same time, Ms Mijatović calls on the EU to assume more responsibility and to define a mechanism enabling other Member States to take in people currently stranded in Greece in order to “[give] Greece breathing space” and make necessary “structural improvements”.
MEP Damien Carême (Greens/EFA, France) was not allowed to visit the EU-managed identification centre (‘hotspot’) while travelling on the Greek island of Samos on Thursday. Having seen the surrounding camps, he condemned the conditions imposed on migrants as “disgraceful” and called on the EU to provide a “sustainable and united response” to better receive asylum seekers in Europe, specifically unaccompanied minors and to urge Member States to finally agree on European asylum system reform.
On the same day, the advocate general of the EU Court of Justice ruled that Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic had failed to fulfil their obligations by refusing to take part in the temporary, mandatory relocation mechanism for asylum seekers (see EUROPE 12361/1). (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc with Mathieu Bion)