On the Doorstep of Europe. Heath Cabot
continue to structure many elements of the ARS. These include the importance of English in many of the official forms and documents, and the interview procedures through which client eligibility is determined, modeled explicitly on UNHCR refugee status determination procedures (discussed in detail in Chapters 3 and 4). Before the 1991 establishment of a nationalized process for accepting refugees, the UNHCR adjudicated asylum applications in Greece, resettling those it recognized as refugees. The ARS assisted applicants with their claims, providing legal support and advice. As the Greek state itself began to process applications, the ARS maintained its role of providing legal support for asylum seekers. Now there is a social service department at the ARS and an entire floor devoted to educational materials, particularly for children. Yet with its strong tradition of providing legal support and casework, the ARS legal service (nomiki ipiresia [νομική υπηρεσία]) fills an important gap in the panorama of legal assistance available to asylum seekers.
While the ARS is devoted primarily to providing support for individual clients, it also engages in what might be called policy advocacy. It is a member of trans-European networks of asylum advocacy NGOs, and among its stated goals, it strives to share experience and know-how for the configuration of better policy internationally. The ARS has also historically tried to maintain a relatively cooperative relationship not just with the UNHCR but with the agencies of the Greek state that come into contact with asylum seekers (the Ministry of Public Order and Citizen Protection, the Athens police, and police in border areas). ARS workers have explained to me that this more cordial relationship with state agencies is necessary for furthering the cases they take on, but it can also translate directly to an engagement in policy making and implementation. Recently, ARS workers gave their input in the formation of the new asylum system, and former staff members have taking on important positions as overseers and asylum adjudicators, working for both the UNHCR and agencies of the state. This close entwinement of the ARS with more governmental roles, particularly through the social networks of current and former workers, is aptly illustrated through the fieldwork that I conducted in 2011 in the asylum department of the Athens police. I acquired access largely through the assistance of former ARS workers, who were employed by the UNHCR to provide advisory opinions at first-instance adjudications. Yet while formally positioned as advisors, this meant that they were ostensibly working alongside the police. My friends and acquaintances in these positions, most from NGO backgrounds, spoke of the new insight this gave into both the asylum process and the psyches of their former “enemies,” so to speak (the police adjudicators). Yet as one of them explained, this “intimacy” can also be troubling, bespeaking a potential conflation of police, NGO, and international human rights interests through the socialities of everyday practice. This ambivalent relationship between NGO and state responsibilities appears throughout this book as a fundamental dilemma of work and life at the ARS.
In the past, I have heard Greek activists and members of migrant and refugee community groups in Athens describe the ARS as somewhat conservative, explicitly referencing the close relationship between the ARS and the state. Some advocates from other European NGOs described the ARS to me as not vocal, active, or activist enough. One advocate from northern Europe explained that he sometimes finds it hard to work with members of the ARS: “They have all of the cases, they know everything,” but, he lamented, “they don’t write about it.” However, as the asylum process has become an object of active reform, the ARS has also become increasingly visible and vocal, collaborating with other Greek and European organizations in exposing and critiquing practices that continue to be problematic, such as the detention of children and poor reception conditions. With the increased incidences of race-related violence that have accompanied the financial crisis, which I address in Chapters 6 and 7, the ARS has also become more active in anti-racism activities and actions.
Some ARS workers, however, have explained that they simply have too many cases to engage deeply in the more political work necessary for changing policy, which is such an important goal for many asylum related NGOs elsewhere in Europe. During an evening gathering at a 2008 NGO conference in Brussels, I asked Nikos, an ARS delegate, how he felt about the policy focus of many of the other NGOs and if he thought the ARS was engaged in “advocacy,” which had been a buzzword at the conference. He paused for a minute as he thought, then answered rhetorically: “What is ‘advocacy’? I don’t think we do ‘advocacy’ ” (Τι είναι advocacy [Δεν νομίζω ότι κάνουμε advocacy]).11 As one of the more experienced lawyers, with fluent knowledge of English and French, Nikos often represented the ARS at such meetings, collaborating with other NGOs and the UNHCR to lobby government representatives in Greece and elsewhere in Europe. In his own commentary, however, he adamantly resisted the project of policy advocacy, despite his evident engagement in this area. Certainly, with the increasing involvement of the NGO sector in the current reform of the Greek asylum system, such attitudes may be changing. Yet Nikos’s response attests to the central, even entrenched, role of individual casework at the ARS over and against policy advocacy.
At this same Brussels conference, a Dutch advocate, trained as a lawyer, commented astutely on the distinction between casework and policy advocacy: “There are two kinds of workers [in asylum-related NGOs] and they operate in two different time zones. You have policy advocates—lobbyists, but we don’t use that word—who are always focused on the future, who are always trying to change policy. Then you have legal advisors, who are focused on the present, the way the law is now. And it is really hard for these to combine.” Such differences between ARS workers and many of their European counterparts reflect fundamentally differing institutional ethics, varying individual approaches toward law and labor, as well as the specific habitus (Bourdieu 1977) in which this labor unfolds—the anxieties, passions, pressures, and routines that shape workers’ everyday lives.
These disconnects can, however, also reproduce familiar patterns of marginalization. A European NGO conference was held in Greece (Delphi) in May 2007, marking the new centrality of Greece in pan-European asylum advocacy projects, I heard numerous delegates comment on the closed, disorganized nature of the ARS and how difficult they were to work with. “They are just different,” explained one delegate; another commented that in a role-play meant to illustrate the distinctions between state and NGO interests, ARS staff seemed to have confused the two. Such comments echo the moral critiques often lodged at Greece on a European scale, depicting the ARS as backward, even alien, in cahoots (though perhaps unknowingly) with the very corrupt state it “should” be trying to challenge.
Despite its own marginalizing tendencies, however, the MSS decision itself speaks to the surprisingly effective, hybridized advocacy projects that can sometimes emerge across such differences of approach and power and, in particular, the merging of casework with lobbying efforts. The story told in the MSS decision is uncannily reminiscent of the accounts of numerous asylum seekers with whom I spoke during my ethnographic research at the ARS, some of whom appear in this book. Such stories accumulated both in my notes and in the file cabinets of the ARS, as aid candidates chronicled their entries into the EU/Greece and their (at times successful, but often unsuccessful) attempts to travel to other European member states. Many also spoke of their expulsions back to Greece, a country where most claimed never to have intended to stay. ARS lawyers rarely challenged the EU and Greek legislative frameworks that made such stories possible. Rather, lawyers focused on the myriad procedural tangles in each client’s encounter with the Greek asylum system, whether this involved renewing a client’s identity card, lodging an asylum application, preparing for an asylum hearing, writing an appeal, getting someone out of detention, or reorienting “Dublin Returnees.”
MSS, however, was in touch with a savvy, highly motivated lawyer in Belgium, Zouhaier Chihaoui. Through contact initiated with the court even before MSS’s deportation to Greece, he and his lawyer were able to formulate an effective critique not just of Greece’s asylum procedure but also of EU legislation, in particular, the Dublin II Regulation. The decision also invokes various reports on asylum in Greece issued by EU governing bodies and NGOs (including both Stefan’s NGO and the ARS),