Greece has no legal right to suspend asylum requests: UNHCR
Greece has no legal justification for suspending asylum procedures as the country struggles to prevent thousands of migrants from entering its territory, says the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
"Neither the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees nor EU refugee law provides any legal basis for the suspension of the reception of asylum applications," said a UNHCR statement on Monday.
On Saturday, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis of Greece announced the suspension of new asylum applications for one month.
Nearly 13,000 refugees have been blocked from entering Greece since Turkey announced on February 27 that it would no longer prevent hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers in its territory from reaching Europe despite an agreement struck with the European Union (EU) in 2016.
On Monday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Ankara has no plans to stop the flow of migrants into the EU, warning that “millions of refugees” will soon be moving toward Turkey’s borders with the bloc.
Greece has deployed its armed forces to prevent migrants from crossing its border with Turkey over the past days, with various reports of clashes and firing of tear gas to restrain the movement of migrants.
The UNHCR also said in the statement that "all states have a right to control their borders and manage irregular movements but at the same time (they) should refrain from the use of excessive or disproportionate force and maintain systems for handling asylum requests in an orderly manner."
Greek authorities said on Monday that they had thwarted 9,877 attempts to cross the northeastern border over the past 24 hours and at least 68 people had been arrested on charges of illegal entry into the country.
The scenes of refugees heading toward Turkey’s border with Greece have sparked fears of a repeat of the 2015 refugee crisis, when over one million refugees arrived in the EU, most of them fleeing conflict zones in the Middle East and North Africa.
The EU and Turkey signed a deal in 2016 under which Turkey was to hold back refugees hoping to reach Europe via Turkish territory in exchange for financial assistance from Europe.
Ankara complains that funds promised by the EU to help it deal with the 3.7 million Syrian refugees already in the country have been slow to arrive. Turkey’s government had warned in the past that it would open the floodgates if it did not receive more funding.
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