involving a more detailed hearing in front of an advisory committee at the Ministry. Second-instance rejections could only be contested through an application to the Simvoulio tis Epikratias (Council of State [Συμβούλιο της Επικρατείας]), the highest court of administrative law in Greece, which ruled not on the substance of the asylum case but on the procedural integrity of the asylum hearing.8
The vast majority of cases were rejected at first instance, almost as a matter of routine. The appeals process, which would usually take months or even years, entailed a high level of attrition: some asylum seekers left Greece for elsewhere in the EU, while others may never have received notifications of their hearings; even then, there were often problems of language and literacy. The second-instance examination committees consisted of six individuals: a chairperson of the committee, who was from the Legal Council of the State (Nomiko Simvoulio tou Ktratous [Νομικό Συμβούλιο του Κράτους]); one representative from the Aliens Department (Dhiefthinsi Allodhapon [Διεύθηνση Αλλοδαπών]) of the Ministry of Public Order; two representatives from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; one from the UNHCR; and one from the Athens Bar Association. While a greater number of positive decisions were issued at second instance, overall rejection rates remained high. During my primary field research, when the asylum process corresponded to that outlined in Presidential Decree 61/1999, the opinions issued by the committee were advisory, not decisive. Each member would make a recommendation, but final plenary power was accorded to the minister; in a number of cases I read rejections that were issued despite positive recommendations by the majority of the appeals committee. However, ministerial decisions alone do not account for the high number of rejections. Committee recommendations were, by in large, stringent, reflecting also an entrenched culture of suspicion, doubt, and mistrust toward asylum seekers (Daniel and Knudson 1995; Fassin and Rechtman 2010). Following the various changes to the asylum law instantiated in 2008, 2009, and 2010, committee decisions became binding (see Presidential Decrees 90/2008, 81/2009, and 144/2010).
For refugee-related NGOs in Greece and elsewhere in the EU, the problems in the Greek asylum process have also made it a powerful advocacy tool. In language that invoked, almost uncannily, the logics of moral governance I have been outlining here, Stefan laughed: “We use and abuse Greece.” He explained that by targeting the problems evident in Greece, asylum advocates can encourage broader changes in Europe, with more widespread effects. In contrast to the MSS judgment, which bears the disciplined language appropriate to a formal court decision, many NGO and media reports have characterized Greece as backward and disorganized, with corrupt, arcane bureaucracies and violent police. As a result of pan-European advocacy efforts, culminating in the MSS judgment, EU member states have suspended the return of asylum seekers to Greece demanded by the Dublin II Regulation. Partly in response to this growing culture of critique led by Greek and European NGOs (as well as the, then pending, MSS decision), a presidential decree issued in 2010 (114/2010) established a variety of measures meant to make the Greek asylum procedure more efficient and transparent. In January 2011, the Greek government produced a new asylum law (law 3907/2011), which has initiated the process of radically revamping the asylum procedure. Though the law is currently still in the process of implementation, the changes taking place include the formation of a new, semi-independent authority for the processing of asylum claims (based in Athens) and regional offices for the acceptance of applications and the reception of claimants (currently operating in Alexandroupoli, Thessaloniki, and Oresteiada). The new asylum authority began processing applications as of June 2013.9
However well intended, successful, accurate, or inaccurate, the many critiques of Greece’s “crisis” of asylum—many of which, significantly, come from outside Greece—also reinscribe Greece’s position on the margins of Europe and the power asymmetries embedded in that relationship. The conservative Karamanlis government did not do much to shake this image, blaming a lack of infrastructure, organization, capital, and the intrinsic pressures of its geographical position for Greece’s difficulty in managing its borders. Later, in the midst of the financial crisis, Papandreou advocated for increased transparency and oversight in Greece’s asylum process, called for EU assistance in tightening its border enforcement regime, and promised a Greek political will to meet its responsibilities as an EU member state. Both diplomatic tactics, however, reified Greece’s marginality, framing it as an impediment to rectifying the problems of the asylum process.
In addition to their marginalizing effects, the recent characterizations of the Greek asylum procedure as an area of crisis run the risk of mistaking immigration and refugees as entirely new phenomena in Greece. Despite new patterns of displacement and migration, Greece has long been entangled in Balkan, Mediterranean, and more global mobilities. Greece is known primarily as a country of emigration, with large diasporic communities throughout the U.S. (Laliotou 2004), Europe, and Australia, as well as other perhaps less obvious locations such as Sudan, Egypt, Denmark (Christou 2009), and Ethiopia. Greece has also functioned for years as a migration destination, with mass arrivals from the former Soviet bloc and the Middle East and Africa in the late eighties and early nineties. Greece only began offering protection to refugees within its own territory in 1991, with the issuance of Presidential Decree 1975/1991,10 which formally established a foundational legal framework for multiple forms of migration to Greece, but it engaged in resettlement projects before that. In addition to large communities of Albanian migrants, there are also significant, and relatively established, communities of first-and second-generation migrants from countries such as Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Bulgaria, Eritrea (Petronati 2000), Romania, and the Philippines.
The current terrain of refugee protection in Greece is also overlaid upon Greece’s involvement in forced population movements in the early and mid-twentieth centuries. The Treaty of Lausanne and the 1923 “population exchange” following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, in which some two million ethnic Greeks and Turks were (in many cases, forcibly) relocated to their ancestral homelands as refugees, has been characterized as one of the first implementations of Modern European refugee law. In what is often denoted as the “Greek Catastrophe,” ethnic Greeks were displaced from Asia Minor, particularly from areas near the eastern Aegean and Black Sea coasts, including Constantinople and Smyrna—the khamenes patridhes [χάμενες πατρίδες]) (lost homelands) (see Hirschon 2003, 1989; Papailias 2004). This territory was once the center of the Greco-Byzantine Empire, but long after it came under Ottoman, then Turkish, rule, it remained central to the imagined, irredentist vision of the Modern Greek nation state. While Lausanne initiated the first and perhaps most violent of these refugee movements, it was followed by various waves of “return” migrations of Black Sea Greeks from the former Soviet bloc (Ascherson 1995; Tsimouris 2001, 2007; Voutira 2003) and, just as controversially, a series of expulsions and eventual repatriations following the Greek Civil War (see Danforth and van Boeschoten 2011). These diverse groups of refugees, across disparate experiences of displacement and return, often found themselves at the social and economic margins of the Greek national body, thus challenging dominant notions of Greek identity (Christou 2006; Hirschon 1989; Karakasidou 1997). The figure of the “refugee” (prosfighas [πρόσφυγας]) has thus come to hold powerful and fraught connotations that are eminently and specifically Greek (Cowan 2008; Voutira 2003). Yet those now seeking refuge in Greece are perhaps even more marginalized, juxtaposed against the increasingly longstanding and accepted presence of refugees who lay claim to Greek heritage.
Since 2010 there have, according to many of my long-term interlocutors, been significant increases in efficiency and recognition rates at all stages of the procedure, thanks largely to personnel and procedural shifts. The Presidential Decree of 2010 (114/2010) introduced more systematic trainings for police officers examining asylum cases, as well as the possibility for representatives from the UNHCR or collaborating NGOs to take an advisory role in first instance decisions. Experts in refugee law were appointed to second-instance committees meant to deal with the backlog of cases, which led to a notable increase in positive decisions. Until recently (June 2013), new applications still fell under the purview of the Ministry of Public Order and Citizen Protection and, thus, the police, though this is changing, as the asylum authority in Athens recently opened
