Statement on Greece’s Implementation of the EU Migration Pact: Institutionalising Exception, Detention and Exclusion

On World Refugee Day, seventy-five years after the adoption of the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention as a cornerstone of international refugee law, we warn that Greece’s newly adopted law to implement the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum is likely to undermine access to fundamental rights by asylum seekers. The new law re-organises the asylum system around intensified control, deterrence and detention. It risks structurally normalising systematic deprivation of liberty, procedural exclusion and socio-economic precarity – with profound consequences for people on the move, fundamental legal safeguards and core guarantees of the rule of law. In doing so, it entrenches practices already seen in Closed Controlled Access Centres (CCACs) on the islands, where unlawful de facto detention and inhuman living conditions have become a blueprint for the Pact’s border regime.

First, the law significantly normalises and expands restriction and deprivation of liberty amounting to de facto detention. By undermining the EU and Strasbourg standards that detention must be exceptional, necessary, proportionate, individually justified and time-limited, the law paves the way for systematic de facto mass detention, constituting potential core rule-of-law and Article 5 ECHR infringements. Under various labels and legal constructs – like “restriction of free movement”, “prohibition on exit”, “fiction of non-entry”, “safe zones” for children, and “return hubs” – people who seek to exercise their fundamental right to asylum can be detained for prolonged periods in inappropriate (semi-)closed and isolated facilities. Detention and far-reaching restrictions on movement are stretched across the screening, border, and return procedures, without full detention safeguards and weakened ex officio judicial review. 

Second, protections for those most at risk are hollowed out. The framework for preliminary medical and vulnerability checks during screening remains thin, and there is no clear, robust operational mechanism for translating the findings into a reasoned, reviewable assessment of special procedural guarantees in the asylum procedure for people such as unaccompanied minors, pregnant women, persons with disabilities, and survivors of shipwrecks, gender based violence and human trafficking. There is a real risk that, in practice, gaps in examinations and vulnerability findings will not be consistently recorded, followed up and reflected in later reception and procedural decisions. At the same time, the law re‑opens space for detaining unaccompanied children where it is deemed to “ensure their protection”, allows detention of minors and pregnant women “by exception”, and could consequently overburden guardians with far too many cases. The persistent exposure of children and other vulnerable persons to inappropriate, quasi-detention settings constitutes a potential breach of best-interest obligations and is likely inconsistent with ECtHR and CJEU rulings, with direct consequences for non-refoulement and Art. 3 ECHR compliance.

Third, fair-procedure and access-to-justice guarantees are systematically eroded. The highly accelerated screening procedure and its compressed timelines risk reducing complex protection needs into simplified, error-prone snapshots which are hard to challenge but heavily shape later decisions, including the broad use of fast-track border procedures without an individual and meaningful examination of asylum grounds as well as subsequent return procedures. The law envisages the use of AI-tools in interpretation and transcription without strong human oversight, reliability or contestability, despite the high-risk nature of asylum related AI use. 

The law doesn’t guarantee unhindered access of lawyers and legal counselling organisations to facilities which has in practice already been highly restricted. This risks leaving many applicants in quasi-closed settings without timely, individualised legal assistance. The provision of (free) legal aid, interpretation, independent monitoring and effective remedies are not adequately ensured. At the same time, widened inadmissibility grounds, the continued use of fees for subsequent applications as well as expansive “safe country” concepts, and a broadened use of non-automatic suspensive effect in a wide range of appeal situations together push people out of the system often on purely procedural grounds, often in parallel with return decisions. These interferences with the rights of asylum seekers contradict EU standards on fair hearing, effective remedy, and high-risk AI in asylum. Altogether, they constitute a system of “fast-track by design” which people cannot meaningfully understand and thus in which they cannot adequately present their claims, heightening the risk of wrongful rejections and refoulement, undermining the effectiveness of the asylum system as a whole.

Fourth, the law produces and entrenches socio-economic exclusion. Material reception conditions and health‑care access remain conditional on strict compliance with procedural and behavioural obligations and can be restricted or withdrawn on a wide range of grounds, leaving people at real risk of precarity. Applicants in border and accelerated procedures are excluded from access to work and applicants in border procedures are barred from language courses. Recognised refugees and beneficiaries of subsidiary protection remain trapped in long renewal backlogs and interim documentation that, in practice, is often not accepted, effectively blocking access to rights linked to their status, including the right to work. These regulations structurally produce destitution, homelessness and long-term marginalisation, in tension with minimum-standards and equal-treatment requirements under EU law and with Art. 3 ECHR.

Finally, all of this is framed within a logic of permanent “state of exception”, with “crisis” and “force-majeure” clauses, the fiction non-entry and broad discretionary powers, special derogations and fast-track procedures that can be activated and prolonged over time, that go beyond the restrictions the Pact itself requires. At the same time, the border-monitoring mechanism foreseen in EU law is either deferred or designed in a way that does not guarantee independence, an effective and genuine human-rights mandate, and meaningful participation of national human rights institutions and civil society organisations. In combination, these elements expand state power and coercion while oversight is diluted, posing a serious risk of further erosion of the rule of law, non-refoulement and the right and access to asylum.

Taken together, the implementation of the EU Migration Pact by Greece is set to institutionalise a politics of exception, detention and exclusion – at the border and beyond, through the expansion and multiplication of restrictive administrative and legal measures across the entire territory. A rights-respecting implementation and an asylum system that is grounded in fundamental principles of international human rights and asylum law must reverse this logic. 

We therefore stress the importance of and demand the respect of obligations to the right to liberty, free movement, protection, fair and accessible procedures, and socio-economic rights for all.

 

Signatories: 

  • I Have Rights
  • Mobile Info Team
  • Centre for Legal Aid