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Metadrasi - metadrasi huffpost pappa article s

Huffpost publishes the article of Lora Pappa on the new bill on asylum

Metadrasi - metadrasi huffpost pappa article

Huffpost publishes the article of Lora Pappa, METAdrasi’s President, on the the new bill regarding the asylum procedures.

Read the full article translated in English bellow.


The tightening of the asylum procedure will backfire

Passing the bill without significant interventions will, among other things, lead to a much slower process than the current one and with a doubtful outcome in terms of increasing returns and deportations.

The asylum procedure currently in place, with minimal changes, was established before 2013 and has been in place for several years. The few changes that have been legislated since then have been either of an ameliorative nature or mainly to implement the EU-Turkey Joint Action Plan and in particular the “safe third country” clause – i.e. the judgement on whether Turkey constitutes a safe country for refugees.

The creation of the new Asylum Service, as it was called in 2013, was a huge step in Greece, of which we were all proud. It is no coincidence that since 2013 and for a number of years, the number of appeals and applications for annulment in the courts, especially in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), has fallen sharply. The new asylum process was considered to be of high quality and fair and we gained dignity, respect and an equal footing with our European partners.

The draft law on the asylum procedure, despite what has been announced, does not bring structural changes to the asylum procedure. What it does achieve is to incorporate a plethora of provisions that lead to complicating the existing procedure, perhaps in the hope that this will make it easier to reject asylum applications and thus to deport and return people. Apart from whether these changes are in line with the relevant European legislation, which the courts will immediately be called upon to judge, the question for the authors of the draft law should be whether this objective will actually be achieved and whether our country will not again find itself in the limelight for not respecting human rights.

We should not forget that in January 2011 Greece was condemned by the ECHR, among other things, because the asylum procedure did not respect the basic principles of the Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees, with the result that Greece cannot be considered a safe country for refugees. This is also the reason why successive governments supported the radical change in Greece’s asylum system. If we return to the pre-2011 era, what would we have achieved?

Passing the bill without significant interventions will, among other things, lead to a much slower process than today and with a doubtful outcome in terms of increasing returns and deportations.

For example, the draft law provides that an appeal at second instance will not have the automatic effect of suspending deportation and the applicant will have to appeal both the first instance rejection and the deportation decision. The result: the doubling of appeals before an appeal authority that has already accumulated a large number of cases whose decisions are pending.

The governments of our country, faced with the impasse of the ever-increasing flows of refugees on the one hand and the impossibility of distributing the refugees to the other countries, which are geographically more distant from the European external borders, are at some point taking steps which they believe will limit the flows of refugees. However, practice and the history of recent years show that tightening up the asylum procedure causes huge delays and, in this case, will further overburden already overburdened services and is unlikely to have the desired effect. Rather than expending energy on legislative interventions of dubious effect, would it not be more beneficial to concentrate on better and more flexible organisation of our services and on more thorough planning to strengthen them and train the staff of the services?

There is great room for improvement in the state mechanism in order to manage with dignity the refugees arriving in our country and with respect to the letter and the spirit of the 1951 Geneva Convention. Any blackmailing dilemmas should not lead us to actions which, when the moment of reckoning comes, will backfire on us. Then no one will support us, our partners will wash their hands of us and we will have to take the full price of taking responsibility ourselves.

The reality is that, unfortunately, the responsibility should be sought in our European partners. And that is why, quite rightly, the previous government, like the current one, continue to stress at every opportunity that the number of asylum seekers in Greece is extremely disproportionate to any other European country and require solidarity and sharing of responsibilities, not only in Europe, but in all developed countries. Intensifying and systematically exerting pressure in this direction, with concrete proposals based on hard evidence, is the only viable approach to managing the migration issue.

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