About fifty non-governmental organizations criticized Thursday the "
policy of confinement
" of asylum seekers in camps in Greece, one year to the day after the fire in the Moria camp on the island of Lesbos.
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Greece is pursuing "
a harmful policy based on the confinement of asylum seekers and refugees
", denounce the NGOs which have signed a joint forum, including Amnesty International, Human Rights 360, the Greek Council for Refugees. “
With the financial and technical support of the European Commission, the authorities in Greece are building fences and walls around a dozen existing camps but also closed camps in remote corners on the Aegean islands
”, denounce- they. They call for "
abandoning plans to severely restrict the movement of refugees in camps in Greece
."
On the Greek island of Lesbos, the Moria camp, then the largest in Europe, was completely devastated by flames on September 9, 2020 by two successive fires.
More than 12,000 people left homeless had been hastily relocated to a temporary camp, which still exists.
In March, the European Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, announced in Lesvos the allocation of 276 million euros in European funds to Greece for new reception centers for migrants on five Aegean islands facing Turkey, including Lesbos.
The new Lesbos camp was due to be delivered before winter, but work has not yet started.
The one in Samos is due to open at the end of September.
Depression and anxiety among refugees
These new centers, whose access and exits will be closed and controlled, "
will prevent the effective identification of vulnerable people
", "
limit asylum seekers' access to services
" and "
amplify the harmful effect of confinement. on people's mental health
”. According to the NGO International Rescue Committee (IRC), 96% of the refugees she follows in Lesvos suffer from a state of depression and 93% have symptoms of acute anxiety. “
Greece continues to provide asylum seekers with undignified conditions that have proven to be detrimental to their mental health and well-being,
” said Dukas Protogiros, psychologist for the NGO in Lesbos. "
We are very worried that the new model (of closed camps) will only worsen the mental health of people stranded on the islands,
”adds the humanitarian.
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Athens, on the contrary, welcomes the significant decongestion of the camps on the islands. In Lesbos, there are only 3,752 migrants left, according to official figures, against nearly 13,000 a year ago. “
We have regained control (of the situation). We have reduced migratory flows, reduced the number of residents and minimized the impact on local populations,
”Migration Minister Notis Mitarachi said in a statement on Thursday. “
We have turned an out of control crisis into a manageable situation
,” he says. Humanitarian organizations explain this drop in arrivals on the Greek islands by the systematic and illegal refoulement of migrants to Turkey, which the Greek conservative government denies.
