In the early hours of Wednesday, over five hundred people were rescued off the tiny Greek island of Gavdos, having packed into a boat from Libya in the hope of reaching Europe. That same afternoon, Greece’s prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, announced that his country would suspend asylum applications for the next three months.
Critics argue that the pause has no basis in Greek, European Union, or international law. In the immediate term, it will have devastating consequences for asylum seekers. It further reveals Greece’s ongoing project of chiseling away at the right to asylum, until only dust is left.
In the Greek Parliament on Wednesday afternoon, Mitsotakis linked the suspension to an increase in arrivals of asylum seekers on the southernmost Greek islands of Gavdos and Crete. He commented: “This extraordinary situation requires extraordinary measures to deal with it.”
Greece’s minister of migration, Thanos Plevris, stated the government’s position more plainly in a television interview last week, calling the arrivals of asylum seekers an “invasion.” He said: “We were shown a plan in western Libya involving three million migrants. If anyone thinks we will allow that population to enter Europe, then we are talking about population replacement.”
The suspended examination of asylum applications concerns all arrivals departing from Northern Africa via a route increasingly used by people trying to reach Europe. The Greek government reported that over 7,000 people arrived via this route in just ten days — and termed this a “state of emergency.”
So why are so many thousands of people taking this dangerous path — one that depends on notorious traffickers in Libya, and that demands that they cross rough and dangerous…
Auteur: Moira Lavelle
