Systemic deficiencies persist in immigration detention in Greece
RSA Submission to the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe
Athens, 24 October 2024: Greece has still not overcome systemic flaws in its use of immigration detention, Refugee Support Aegean (RSA) told the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe last week.
Greece was condemned for breaches of the human right to liberty in the context of immigration detention in the M.D. v. Greece group of cases. The Committee of Ministers is responsible for supervising the execution of the European Court of Human Rights judgments. The Greek government has requested the Committee to end its supervision.
Our contribution urges the Committee to continue monitoring the country’s compliance with the right to liberty in light of persisting evidence of deficiencies in immigration detention, as:
- Greece systematically orders pre-removal detention against newly arriving asylum seekers with well-founded claims, originating mainly from Syria and Afghanistan where removal is neither legally nor practically feasible.
- There is a generalised lack of linguistic assistance and a complete absence of free legal assistance from the state to detained persons, resulting in less than 1.5% of removal orders appealed before the Hellenic Police and less than one in five detention orders challenged before the courts through “objections against detention”.
- Serious concerns prevail in relation to the effectiveness of judicial review against detention orders, not least due to extreme disparities between decision-making in objections (over 40% of orders quashed) and ex officio review of prolongations of detention orders (only around 0.5% of orders quashed). Crucially, both types of review are performed by the same courts based on the same legal standards.
RSA systematically monitors and releases official data and analysis on administrative detention. This data demonstrates the country’s ongoing violation of its international obligations regarding administrative detention (see data for the first half of 2024, as well as for 2023 and 2022).
