UN, rights groups accuse Greece of using pandemic to ‘step up’ migration restrictions

While numerous NGOs and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have accused Greece of using the Covid-19 epidemic as pretext to “abandon” hundreds of migrants at sea since March, Athens denies the charge and denounces “misinformation”. After revelations in the New York Times and accusations by NGOs that Greece has abandoned the migrants at sea, the Greek section of the UNHCR said on Friday it had “reports and testimonies that people were left adrift” in the Aegean Sea without being rescued by the Greek coastguard.

UNHCR specified in a statement that these people “were left adrift in the open sea for a long period of time, often in hard-to-manage and overcrowded boats, waiting to be rescued”. Two days before these appeals, Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis categorically denied the accusations, branding them as “misinformation” orchestrated by Turkey. “Greece is a country that respects the rule of law, we have granted asylum to tens of thousands of people,” Mitsotakis said in an interview on US television station CNN on August 19.

For Legal Centre Lesbos, an NGO that offers assistance to refugees and migrants trying to enter Europe via the Greek island, Mitsotakis is in “denial of reality”. “This practice is widespread, systemic and illegal,” the organisation said on Twitter after the prime minister’s television interview.The New York Times’s investigation published on August 14 claims that Greece “abandoned” migrants at sea to be rescued by the Turkish coastguard. According to the US daily, Greek authorities brought migrants to the limit of the country’s territorial waters before leaving them to their fate on “inflatable and sometimes overburdened life rafts”.

According to the NGO, Greek authorities developed the habit of damaging boats before abandoning them. The practice of damaging migrants’ boats is also cited in the New York Times article, which states too that the Greek coastguard transferred migrants to sometimes undersized rescue boats near Greece and Turkey’s maritime borders and set them adrift.

Source: France24