On the Doorstep of Europe. Heath Cabot
to the displacements of people affected through the 2011 “Arab Spring” and its aftermath; in October 2013, over 300 people were estimated dead when a boat sank off the coast of Lampedusa. Greece, however, has emerged as an increasingly problematic border country at the center of controversies over the security, humanitarianism, and solvency of Europe (see Green 2010). Since my meeting with Stefan at the edge of the Aegean, the EU has produced increasingly powerful apparatuses of migration management (Feldman 2011), both in the sea and in Evros, in response to the continued spike in crossings on the Greek borders. In 2010, following a request from the Greek government, Frontex, the EU’s border management agency, deployed its first “RABITS” (Rapid Deployment Border Intervention Teams) to assist in deterring undocumented crossings along the Greek borders. On the face of it, Frontex signifies a powerful assertion of EU involvement in policing Greek borders, yet in practice it also bespeaks a more messy set of allegiances and sovereignties. Rather than staffing its own forces, so to speak, Frontex hires, retrains, and redeploys border guards from EU member countries; this also applies to the equipment and forms of transport employed in Frontex operations, which often bear the emblems of other European states.4 The former Papandreou government also initiated a plan to build a fence along the Evros border with EU funding; on a visit to Turkey in January 2011 to discuss the border fence, minister of citizen protection Christos Papoutsis, explicitly referenced the U.S./Mexico border as a model.
Regional and national legislation also have an important role in shaping the Greek border context. A readmission agreement with Turkey (signed in 2001) has encouraged ad hoc expulsions, where migrants are often simply pushed back across the border without being returned to their home countries; this was the danger MSS faced on his return to Greece. The legality of this agreement is questionable, as the deportees include, almost always, “mixed flows” of migrants and asylum seekers (see Feldman 2012), and neither side does an effective job of identifying those wishing to apply for asylum.5 Greece is obliged under both international and EU law to hear the claims of applicants for protection. However, as reported by many asylum seekers and some local inhabitants in border regions, during the time I was in the field the Greek police allegedly undertook widespread deportations of “mixed” groups of migrants and asylum seekers to Turkey.6 For many deportees, however, such practices encourage new strategies of crossing: some enter Europe via new routes and others attempt successive crossings at the Greek borders. I met many during my fieldwork who underwent multiple entries and expulsions.
Borders are not just territorial, however; they are also manifested and negotiated in the domain of law, which produces its own spatial politics and geographies (see Coutin and Yngvesson 2006; Coutin 2007; Darian-Smith 1999, 2007; Rouse 1991; Volpp 2012; Zilberg 2011). Legalization processes are most often initiated in urban centers, primarily Athens and Thessaloniki, making entry into the legal territory of Greece often dependent on further internal movement and travel. Yet access to legalization processes—whether through the asylum procedure or through routes of economic migration—is itself circumscribed by aggressive forms of internal policing, which have only increased with the sociopolitical instabilities accompanying the Greek financial difficulties (Xenakis and Cheliotis 2012; Cheliotis 2013 in process). In Chapter 2, I highlight the police violence that, during the period of my research, impinged on access to asylum through an account of activities at “Allodhapon,” the Athens “Aliens Police,” at that time in charge of examining most first-instance asylum applications. The fact that the threshold of the asylum procedure was, quite literally, the doorstep of a tightly and often violently guarded police compound incited many would-be applicants to remain in spaces of legal limbo (Cabot 2012) or “nonexistence” (Coutin 2000), without the protection offered by papers. Increasingly powerful enforcement measures throughout the Athens city center target individuals through a clear reliance on racial profiling. In areas of the city known to have heavy foreign populations (Omonia Square and its environs, Attiki, and Exarcheia), it is common to find a gun-toting MAT (SWAT) officer stationed on street corners, while less visibly armed patrols accost persons of color and demand their papers. In the summer of 2009, for instance, I found a rather gregarious group of police playing cards outside an unlicensed Sudanese restaurant that asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, and smugglers alike were known to frequent. In response to this increasing militarization of the Athens city center, many asylum seekers and migrants look for work and refuge in the countryside (Lawrence 2007; Verinis 2011) and in the islands, even—interestingly—in border regions (Cabot and Lenz 2012), where policing is focused more on safeguarding the border from without than targeting threats from within. The asylum procedure is a particularly charged element of the Greek border scenario. The question of asylum inflects broader Greek and European anxieties over responses to immigration, humanitarianism, security, and Greece’s capacities to handle (or not) the movements across its borders.
Asylum in Greece
Despite its symbolic and legal significance, the MSS decision only emerged a number of years after the Greek asylum process began to raise red flags for European and international advocacy communities. It is difficult to account fully for the exclusionary and sluggish qualities of the Greek asylum system. With the bureaucratic inefficiencies that have plagued the Greek process (particularly evident in the overwhelming backlog of cases), rejections of asylum cases have also, perhaps inadvertently, provided ways of streamlining through “buck passing” via appeals and encouraging attrition among applicants. Though the appeals process was suspended between 2009 and 2010, during most of my research for this book the asylum process entailed two “instances” or vathmi (levels [βαθμοί]).7 Claimants lodged first-instance applications at a central police station (in most cases, in Athens, though also in Thessaloniki) and underwent asylum interviews there. Rejected cases could then be appealed to the second instance, involving a more detailed hearing in front of an advisory committee at the Ministry. Second-instance rejections could only be contested through an application to the Simvoulio tis Epikratias (Council of State [Συμβούλιο της Επικρατείας]), the highest court of administrative law in Greece, which ruled not on the substance of the asylum case but on the procedural integrity of the asylum hearing.8
The vast majority of cases were rejected at first instance, almost as a matter of routine. The appeals process, which would usually take months or even years, entailed a high level of attrition: some asylum seekers left Greece for elsewhere in the EU, while others may never have received notifications of their hearings; even then, there were often problems of language and literacy. The second-instance examination committees consisted of six individuals: a chairperson of the committee, who was from the Legal Council of the State (Nomiko Simvoulio tou Ktratous [Νομικό Συμβούλιο του Κράτους]); one representative from the Aliens Department (Dhiefthinsi Allodhapon [Διεύθηνση Αλλοδαπών]) of the Ministry of Public Order; two representatives from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; one from the UNHCR; and one from the Athens Bar Association. While a greater number of positive decisions were issued at second instance, overall rejection rates remained high. During my primary field research, when the asylum process corresponded to that outlined in Presidential Decree 61/1999, the opinions issued by the committee were advisory, not decisive. Each member would make a recommendation, but final plenary power was accorded to the minister; in a number of cases I read rejections that were issued despite positive recommendations by the majority of the appeals committee. However, ministerial decisions alone do not account for the high number of rejections. Committee recommendations were, by in large, stringent, reflecting also an entrenched culture of suspicion, doubt, and mistrust toward asylum seekers (Daniel and Knudson 1995; Fassin and Rechtman 2010). Following the various changes to the asylum law instantiated in 2008, 2009, and 2010, committee decisions became binding (see Presidential Decrees 90/2008, 81/2009, and 144/2010).
For refugee-related NGOs in Greece and elsewhere in the EU, the problems in the Greek asylum process have also made it a powerful advocacy tool. In language that invoked, almost uncannily, the logics of moral governance I have been outlining here, Stefan laughed: “We use and abuse Greece.” He explained that by targeting the problems evident in Greece, asylum advocates can encourage broader changes in Europe, with more widespread effects. In contrast to the MSS judgment, which bears the disciplined