Greece passes North Africa asylum ban amid rights groups' opposition

By Angeliki Koutantou

ATHENS (Reuters) -Greek lawmakers voted on Friday to temporarily stop processing asylum requests from migrants arriving from North Africa by sea in a bid to reduce arrivals into Europe's southernmost tip, a move rights groups and opposition parties have called illegal.

The ban comes amid a surge in migrants reaching the island of Crete and after talks with Libya's Benghazi-based government to stem the flow were cancelled acrimoniously this week.

It marks a further hardening of Greece's stance towards migrants under Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis' centre-right government, which has built a fence at its northern land borders and boosted sea patrols since it came to power in 2019. 

Human rights groups accuse Greece of forcefully turning back asylum-seekers on its sea and land borders. This year, the European Union border agency said it was reviewing 12 cases of potential human rights violations by Greece. 

The government denies wrongdoing. 

The law, which received 177 votes in favour and 74 against, halts asylum processing for at least three months and allows authorities to quickly repatriate migrants without any prior identification process.

"Faced with the sharp increase in irregular arrivals by sea from North Africa, particularly from Libya to Crete, we have taken the difficult but absolutely necessary decision to temporarily suspend the examination of asylum applications," Mitsotakis was quoted by his office as telling the German newspaper Bild on Friday.

"Greece is not a gateway to Europe open to everyone." 

Greece was on the front line of a migration crisis in 2015-16 when hundreds of thousands of migrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa passed through its islands and mainland. 

Since then, flows have dropped off dramatically. While there has been a rise in arrivals to the outlying islands of Crete and Gavdos - those numbers have quadrupled to over 7,000 so far this year - sea arrivals to Greece as a whole dropped by 5.5% to 17,000 in the first half of this year, U.N. data show. 

Rights groups and opposition parties said the ban approved by parliament violates human rights.

"Seeking refuge is a human right; preventing people from doing so is both illegal and inhumane," said Martha Roussou, a senior advocacy adviser for aid group IRC. 

Thousands of irregular migrants have been rescued by the Greek coastguard off Crete in recent days, the Athens government said. Hundreds of them, including children, were temporarily housed at an exhibition centre in Agyia, near the city of Chania in western Crete, amid sweltering summer temperatures.

Reuters footage on Friday showed a migrant who had fainted being taken out of the shelter on a stretcher.

Crete lacks an organised reception facility. The government said it would build a migrant camp there but the local tourist industry is worried the plan could harm the island's image.

“The weight is too great, the load is too big, and solutions now have to be found ... at a central level,” said George Tsapakos, a deputy governor for Crete.

(Reporting by Renee Maltezou and Angeliki Koutantou; editing by Edward McAllister and Mark Heinrich)