On the Doorstep of Europe. Heath Cabot
have characterized Greece as backward and disorganized, with corrupt, arcane bureaucracies and violent police. As a result of pan-European advocacy efforts, culminating in the MSS judgment, EU member states have suspended the return of asylum seekers to Greece demanded by the Dublin II Regulation. Partly in response to this growing culture of critique led by Greek and European NGOs (as well as the, then pending, MSS decision), a presidential decree issued in 2010 (114/2010) established a variety of measures meant to make the Greek asylum procedure more efficient and transparent. In January 2011, the Greek government produced a new asylum law (law 3907/2011), which has initiated the process of radically revamping the asylum procedure. Though the law is currently still in the process of implementation, the changes taking place include the formation of a new, semi-independent authority for the processing of asylum claims (based in Athens) and regional offices for the acceptance of applications and the reception of claimants (currently operating in Alexandroupoli, Thessaloniki, and Oresteiada). The new asylum authority began processing applications as of June 2013.9
However well intended, successful, accurate, or inaccurate, the many critiques of Greece’s “crisis” of asylum—many of which, significantly, come from outside Greece—also reinscribe Greece’s position on the margins of Europe and the power asymmetries embedded in that relationship. The conservative Karamanlis government did not do much to shake this image, blaming a lack of infrastructure, organization, capital, and the intrinsic pressures of its geographical position for Greece’s difficulty in managing its borders. Later, in the midst of the financial crisis, Papandreou advocated for increased transparency and oversight in Greece’s asylum process, called for EU assistance in tightening its border enforcement regime, and promised a Greek political will to meet its responsibilities as an EU member state. Both diplomatic tactics, however, reified Greece’s marginality, framing it as an impediment to rectifying the problems of the asylum process.
In addition to their marginalizing effects, the recent characterizations of the Greek asylum procedure as an area of crisis run the risk of mistaking immigration and refugees as entirely new phenomena in Greece. Despite new patterns of displacement and migration, Greece has long been entangled in Balkan, Mediterranean, and more global mobilities. Greece is known primarily as a country of emigration, with large diasporic communities throughout the U.S. (Laliotou 2004), Europe, and Australia, as well as other perhaps less obvious locations such as Sudan, Egypt, Denmark (Christou 2009), and Ethiopia. Greece has also functioned for years as a migration destination, with mass arrivals from the former Soviet bloc and the Middle East and Africa in the late eighties and early nineties. Greece only began offering protection to refugees within its own territory in 1991, with the issuance of Presidential Decree 1975/1991,10 which formally established a foundational legal framework for multiple forms of migration to Greece, but it engaged in resettlement projects before that. In addition to large communities of Albanian migrants, there are also significant, and relatively established, communities of first-and second-generation migrants from countries such as Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Bulgaria, Eritrea (Petronati 2000), Romania, and the Philippines.
The current terrain of refugee protection in Greece is also overlaid upon Greece’s involvement in forced population movements in the early and mid-twentieth centuries. The Treaty of Lausanne and the 1923 “population exchange” following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, in which some two million ethnic Greeks and Turks were (in many cases, forcibly) relocated to their ancestral homelands as refugees, has been characterized as one of the first implementations of Modern European refugee law. In what is often denoted as the “Greek Catastrophe,” ethnic Greeks were displaced from Asia Minor, particularly from areas near the eastern Aegean and Black Sea coasts, including Constantinople and Smyrna—the khamenes patridhes [χάμενες πατρίδες]) (lost homelands) (see Hirschon 2003, 1989; Papailias 2004). This territory was once the center of the Greco-Byzantine Empire, but long after it came under Ottoman, then Turkish, rule, it remained central to the imagined, irredentist vision of the Modern Greek nation state. While Lausanne initiated the first and perhaps most violent of these refugee movements, it was followed by various waves of “return” migrations of Black Sea Greeks from the former Soviet bloc (Ascherson 1995; Tsimouris 2001, 2007; Voutira 2003) and, just as controversially, a series of expulsions and eventual repatriations following the Greek Civil War (see Danforth and van Boeschoten 2011). These diverse groups of refugees, across disparate experiences of displacement and return, often found themselves at the social and economic margins of the Greek national body, thus challenging dominant notions of Greek identity (Christou 2006; Hirschon 1989; Karakasidou 1997). The figure of the “refugee” (prosfighas [πρόσφυγας]) has thus come to hold powerful and fraught connotations that are eminently and specifically Greek (Cowan 2008; Voutira 2003). Yet those now seeking refuge in Greece are perhaps even more marginalized, juxtaposed against the increasingly longstanding and accepted presence of refugees who lay claim to Greek heritage.
Since 2010 there have, according to many of my long-term interlocutors, been significant increases in efficiency and recognition rates at all stages of the procedure, thanks largely to personnel and procedural shifts. The Presidential Decree of 2010 (114/2010) introduced more systematic trainings for police officers examining asylum cases, as well as the possibility for representatives from the UNHCR or collaborating NGOs to take an advisory role in first instance decisions. Experts in refugee law were appointed to second-instance committees meant to deal with the backlog of cases, which led to a notable increase in positive decisions. Until recently (June 2013), new applications still fell under the purview of the Ministry of Public Order and Citizen Protection and, thus, the police, though this is changing, as the asylum authority in Athens recently opened its doors. The outcomes of the new asylum process are still to be seen. A former ARS lawyer, who now assists decision makers at the new asylum authority, highlighted that she was deeply impressed by the quality of the employees and of the work that they were doing. However, another former ARS lawyer expressed concern that these decision makers’ lack of experience, and lack of familiarity with the problems embedded in the refugee status determination procedure, would translate to an overly stringent approach.
Despite skepticism about the new process among advocates, bureaucrats, and asylum seekers alike, I have also noticed a growing discourse among adjudicators and advocates regarding positive change, cooperation, and increased transparency. One UNHCR representative told me that the asylum process is “something in Greece that is actually improving,” though she lamented that with the financial crisis, this does not hold much significance among a wider public. In 2011, I spoke with police and UNHCR representatives alike who praised a more structured interview process at first instance, a greater sense of competency and efficiency among adjudicators, and more effective collaborations between the Ministry, the UNHCR, and civil society organizations. I also interviewed one of the workers who assisted in the training of police adjudicators, and he underscored that a core element of his approach had been to “treat all parties with respect.” He added that after the first day of training he had been thanked by a number of police officers, who explained that they had never received any formal education about asylum-related matters. Despite the evident disciplinary qualities and power asymmetries embedded in such rights-based trainings (Babül 2012), these reform measures seem to have provided substantive relief for those engaged in adjudication processes. The critiques and recent reforms surrounding the “crisis” of asylum are ultimately two-edged, vehicles for change as well as new forms of marginality.
Advocacy and the EU
As the oldest and largest asylum-related NGO in Greece, the Athens Refugee Service has participated in multiple phases of the establishment of the Greek asylum system and has witnessed the changing trends and demographics of asylum applications. This history can be traced through a cursory glance at old files in the storage room on the organization’s sixth floor. Files from the early 1990s attest to the many applicants from the then just-dissolved, former Soviet bloc: most were from Poland and Albania, interspersed with applicants from Iraq, Iran, Turkey (primarily Kurds), Somalia, Syria, and Palestine. During the period of my fieldwork, there were few applicants from Eastern Europe and the Balkans, but large numbers from the Middle East and Africa, and many more Iraqis and Afghans. There were also many from Southeast Asia, in particular Pakistan and Bangladesh, who in 2006 accounted for approximately 50 percent of asylum applications.
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