Richard
Burton

On 7 March 2016, the EU heads of state announced in Brussels that “Irregular flows of migrants along the Western Balkans route have now come to an end.”The next day, no one was allowed to cross the border from Greece to the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, leaving over 46,000 refugees and migrants stranded in mainland Greece.

Greece, with EU assistance, opened 31 temporary accommodation sites on the mainland with capacity for some 33,000 asylum seekers and migrants, the conditions in many of these overcrowded, under-resourced facilities, were inadequate for all but a few days. Accessing the asylum procedure also remained highly problematic in the country, largely as a result of the insufficient resources available to the Greek Asylum Service for registering andprocessing applicants.Greece’s asylum and reception system was already struggling, to such an extent that the European Court of Justice ruled in 2013 that asylum seekers should not be returned to Greece by other EU member states on account of the degrading conditions they would be exposed to. The assistance the EU was providing to prop up Greece’s ailing asylum system became overwhelmingly focused on implementing the EU-Turkey deal, diverting resources and energy away from the processing of relocation applications and asylum claims by those now trapped in Greece, who fall outside the terms of the deal.

While systems and resources were put in place to ensure that arriving refugees and migrants are finger-printed and screened by the police to determine their nationality, not enough was done to prepare Greece for the longer-term reception of large numbers of asylum seekers – despite the swelling of this number being a perfectly foreseeable consequence of the closure of the Balkan route. This failure extended beyond material reception conditions to the provision of information to asylum-seekers on their rights and the processes available to them and the identification of particular vulnerabilities.