Modelling UK Reception on Greece’s Failed Reception System

Post by Andriani Fili, Researcher and Managing Editor, Border Criminologies.  

The UK government’s new plan to forcibly send people seeking asylum in the UK to Rwanda has already been severely criticised. As part of this inhumane, unethical, expensive, and ineffective policy, the British government has also announced the development of new asylum processing and reception centres on UK soil, the first of which is to be located in a former military base in North Yorkshire. Whereas offshoring and outsourcing asylum processing draws on Australian and Israeli immigration procedures, the reception centre in the quaint British town of Linton-on-Ouse is meant to be modelled on the ones in Greece. In this post, I will briefly show why Greece cannot and should not be considered a desirable role model for the reception of people seeking asylum.

The situation at Greece’s borders had been dire long before 2015, when the term ‘crisis’ started being (ab)used to describe anything, from the numbers of people who arrived on Greece’s shores to the government’s catastrophic response to the needs of assistance and protection of hundreds of thousands of people. Since the 1990s, immigration detention and refoulement practices have defined Greece’s response. The asylum system, managed by an untrained and racist police force, welcomed only a limited few. Only in 2011, following widespread national and international criticism, did a Greek government put forward a number of changes to its problematic asylum and reception systems. One of the first steps was to introduce Law 3907/2011, introducing two much needed and long overdue agencies, the new independent Asylum Service and the First Reception Service. It took two more years for this law to come into force. That same year, in 2013, the first reception centre in the country opened in Fylakio, in northern Greece and two mobile units were later opened on the islands of Lesvos and Samos.

The situation at Greece’s borders in 2015, cast a spotlight on a number of highly inconvenient facts that successive governments had been trying to ignore for years; namely, that detention and deterrence policies are neither efficient nor humane responses to people seeking asylum. Yet, what followed next, when the EU demanded that Greece stopped the flow of people, could not have been predicted by even the most pessimistic of commentators. In contradiction with the Common Asylum system, which was based on burden sharing, the European Commission developed the idea of the ‘hotspot approach’. The aim was to help slow the flow of migrants heading to the north, and mitigate security risks by swiftly identifying, registering, and fingerprinting all arrivals in Italy and Greece, as hotspots were considered key to securing the EU’s external borders.

Within a few months, Greece was transformed into a grim waiting room. An investigation into the country’s humanitarian response after 2015 describes a pattern of inertia, concealment of chaos, external pressure and last-minute actions, when it came to housing those who were stuck in Greece. In any case, Greece continued to use a number of pre-removal detention centres, older dedicated detention facilities, and numerous border guard and police stations.

Many refugee camps were full to capacity and host to a range of problems. Almost half of the new sites were created in under ten days, some in very remote locations with little to no access to legal aid, limited access to services and support, and hardly any information offered about their status. Conditions in most open centres fell below international humanitarian standards, to the point where some had been characterised as even ‘unfit for animals’. The island camps, more specifically, have received continuing criticism for their inhumane conditions. In some there was one toilet for 200 individuals, severe overcrowding, reaching in some cases even 10 times the capacity of the centres, and serious gaps in health care, leaving thousands, even the most vulnerable, unattended. Meanwhile, exploitation, violence, rapes, trafficking and torture within most island camps take place regularly.

While not all facilities used to house people in the aftermath of 2015 were detention centres per se, the line between open accommodation and confinement became difficult to draw in practice. This fact, when combined with severely restricted access to the asylum process in these places, rendered most people inside them invisible and immobilised in overcrowded and unhygienic conditions. People were not only stuck inside camps; under the EU-Turkey deal and in view of walls being literally and metaphorically built across Europe they were also physically prevented from leaving Greece. as Evgenia Iliadou describes, ‘amongst all the collateral casualties of the “refugee crisis” measures (militarisation, internalisation/externalisation of the borders, racialisation, delinquency and victimisation/vulnerability), one of the most violent and devastating appears to be the violence of enduring and indefinite waiting.’

Since 2019, the Greek government has been working on its operational plan to address migration and ‘decongest’ the Aegean islands, following a post-election commitment. This strategy culminated in the announcement that the existing ‘hotspot’ camps on the Greek islands would be gradually turned into “closed” centres in order to reduce the flows of people. The plan, backed by €276 million of funding from the European Union, is to create two zones of fencing inside every camp, six metres apart, and to introduce biometric cards to control entry and exit, CCTV monitoring, airport-like bag screening and a secure detention facility. The UK Home Secretary is understood to have been impressed with these plans in Greece during a visit last year and the digitizing of the asylum procedure.

The first such facilities on the islands of Samos, Leros and Kos are already operational in remote and isolated areas with limited access to city centres and NGO services. The situation unfolding in the closed controlled centre of Samos has exceeded even the bleakest scenario. Just three months after its inauguration, it has been described as a high-tech modern prison and a panopticon for refugees. There is no doctor on site and overall access to healthcare is limited, leaving those with severe physical or mental health issues, pregnant women, and elderly people at the discretion of untrained and security and police personnel, who have to decide which medical cases have to be transferred to a hospital. What is more, there is already a legal precedent that proves the use of illegal de facto detention in the centre. As has been reported the administration and security service of the camp are arbitrarily preventing exit without following official procedures, without written justified decisions, and in violation of procedural safeguards and residents’ rights. The facility in Kos, too, has been functioning as a de facto closed center since 2020 which gives rise to concerns that the Greek government’s plans could leave space for arbitrary administrative practices and violations of asylum seekers' rights.

Despite arrivals dropping to a few hundred in all Aegean islands, the large closed controlled centres on the islands of Lesvos and Chios are being constructed too. The Samos centre only hosts less than 400 people seeking asylum in a facility with capacity of 3,000 residents, including 900 in the pre-removal detention section that has not been yet operational. The facilities in Kos and Leros have a capacity of 1540 and 1780 residents respectively but currently only host 280 and 24 residents. As these closed centres are likely to remain relatively empty in the foreseeable future, they act as a reminder to the Greek public and EU member states that Greece will never be again unprepared for mass arrivals. Only this time the conditions will be EU approved and funded and high security detention as a reception practice will be used unapologetically too. 

As with Israel’s failed Rwanda deal and Australia’s failed Manus and Nauru project, Greece’s project to treat people with dignity and humanity has failed too. Instead, it seems none of these governments actually wish to treat people as humans, deserving of equal respect, dignity and access to human rights. On the contrary, these failed asylum and reception systems are intentionally inhumane, dependent on racialised ideas about who is worthy of rights, allegedly to deter people from crossing borders. Ongoing wars, climate change, poverty and severe inequalities in all parts of the world indicate that mobility can no longer be considered an unforeseen crisis; people will, indeed, keep on moving to find better places for them and their families. If the UK government is after a model reception system that puts people under severe mental and physical stress and leaves them stranded within an enormous geographical, physical and psychological limbo, then, in Greece they have come to the right place. If at the last minute, though, they want to offer secure and appropriate housing with access to rights and asylum, then they should keep looking to devise policies that show respect to people who have suffered for far too long.

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How to cite this blog post (Harvard style) 

Fili, A. (2022) Modelling UK Reception on Greece’s Failed Reception System. Available at: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2022/04/modelling-uk [date]