Greece To Overhaul Migrant Camps And Enforce 'air-tight' Borders

Greece announced a plan Wednesday to massively overhaul its overcrowded migrant camps on islands facing Turkey and make borders "air-tight" against a feared new surge of asylum-seekers

Athens, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Nov, 2019 ) :Greece announced a plan Wednesday to massively overhaul its overcrowded migrant camps on islands facing Turkey and make borders "air-tight" against a feared new surge of asylum-seekers.

"Decongesting the islands is a priority at this stage," the government's special coordinator for migration Alkiviadis Stefanis, a former army general and chief of staff, told a news conference.

"These actions are designed to show our determination in dealing with the migrant-refugee crisis," said Stefanis, who is also deputy defence minister.

The government will hire 400 additional guards for the land border with Turkey and 800 for the islands, he said, adding that the measures were aimed at "rendering migrant entry points air-tight".

Three camps are to be closed, on the islands of Lesbos, Chios and Samos, which currently house more than 27,000 people in terrible conditions and which have been repeatedly castigated by rights groups. They have a nominal capacity of just 4,500.

The Greek government said it would replace the camps with three new closed facilities for identification, relocation and deportation with a capacity of at least 5,000 people each, which could be stretched to 7,000.

Smaller camps on the islands of Kos and Leros are also to be remodelled along these lines and enlarged, Stefanis said.

Instead of being allowed to move freely in and out of the camps, asylum-seekers will now be locked up until they are granted refugee status and relocated to the mainland, or they are rejected and sent back to Turkey, officials said.

The European Commission, a spokeswoman told AFP, "welcomes concrete steps... to improve the situation on the islands" as long as they were "in line with the applicable human rights standards".

In the new camps, asylum-seekers will stay in containers and have access to refectories, schools and places of worship, Stefanis said.

The government has vowed to relocate 20,000 asylum-seekers to camps on the mainland by early 2020.