GREECE: Police Show Lawyers A Brutal Face

By Apostolis Fotiadis Reprint | | Print |

Apostolis Fotiadis

ATHENS, Feb 1 2008 (IPS) - Electra Floropoulou of the Lawyers Group for the Rights of Refugees and Migrants was not expecting the police to turn violent when she began taking photographs of the queue of migrants outside the Athens Directorate for Foreigners.

She was among five members of the Lawyers Group on a fact-finding mission Jan. 27. The group had found more than 1,200 migrants in a queue outside the Directorate office.

"Since the Directorate accepts asylum enquiries only on Sundays, they gather outside the building early in the morning and wait there hours," Floropoulou told IPS. "The procedure is humiliating, and the selection of migrants given an appointment for submitting an asylum application is done without any criteria.

"A police officer screams, "Bangladesh". Some people step out, and he chooses the ones he likes. Then he shouts "Pakistan", and this is how it goes on."

Many migrants have to keep coming many times in hope of an appointment.

When the lawyers attempted to document the situation last Sunday, police officers asked for their IDs and demanded they hand over the camera. The police accused them of violating the privacy of the people in the queue.

The police used force when the lawyer refused to hand over the camera. "Somebody pushed me violently apart, and asked for the camera," Floropoulou said. Then he grabbed me by the hair and dragged me some metres."

Apart from the personal shock, what worries Floropoulou is the implication of such police conduct. "If this is the treatment that lawyers who want to defend migrants&#39 rights get, what happens to those who have no status or protection whatsoever."

The lawyers group says conditions outside the Directorate violate the responsibilities of Greece to international agreements like the Geneva Convention of 1949 and the European Convention of Human Rights, but also Greek law.

Greece has informally adopted a &#39closed borders&#39 policy. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), refugee acceptance rate in Greece between 1997 and 2001 was above 15 percent. In 2002 it fell sharply to 0.9 percent, and during the last years has remained below 1 percent. The European average is about 20 percent.

Greece has the lowest acceptance rate in Europe, and one of the lowest in the world.

The authorities maintain legal structures and keep up politically correct rhetoric, but have taken little action in line with that.

Inhuman conditions at detention centres, mistreatment by authorities, absence of interpreters and competent staff at institutions who contact first arriving migrants, and lack of access to information about rights are all too common.

"We do not believe this is a conscious political choice," says Kalliopi Stefani, who is responsible for protection issues at UNHCR. But the extent of disorder cannot be blamed only on administrative incapacity, she said.

"It is just a fact that the department responsible for processing asylum cases in Athens, the only one that essentially functions countrywide, is permanently staffed only with two persons," Stefani told IPS.

The systematic violation of refugees&#39 rights brings a dehumanisation of uniformed officials, increasingly used as a wall between society and foreigners, she said.

"We ask for the indictment of these policemen," Floropoulou said. "It is the only way to isolate mistreatment. Silence will only legitimise them."