now assists decision makers at the new asylum authority, highlighted that she was deeply impressed by the quality of the employees and of the work that they were doing. However, another former ARS lawyer expressed concern that these decision makers’ lack of experience, and lack of familiarity with the problems embedded in the refugee status determination procedure, would translate to an overly stringent approach.
Despite skepticism about the new process among advocates, bureaucrats, and asylum seekers alike, I have also noticed a growing discourse among adjudicators and advocates regarding positive change, cooperation, and increased transparency. One UNHCR representative told me that the asylum process is “something in Greece that is actually improving,” though she lamented that with the financial crisis, this does not hold much significance among a wider public. In 2011, I spoke with police and UNHCR representatives alike who praised a more structured interview process at first instance, a greater sense of competency and efficiency among adjudicators, and more effective collaborations between the Ministry, the UNHCR, and civil society organizations. I also interviewed one of the workers who assisted in the training of police adjudicators, and he underscored that a core element of his approach had been to “treat all parties with respect.” He added that after the first day of training he had been thanked by a number of police officers, who explained that they had never received any formal education about asylum-related matters. Despite the evident disciplinary qualities and power asymmetries embedded in such rights-based trainings (Babül 2012), these reform measures seem to have provided substantive relief for those engaged in adjudication processes. The critiques and recent reforms surrounding the “crisis” of asylum are ultimately two-edged, vehicles for change as well as new forms of marginality.
Advocacy and the EU
As the oldest and largest asylum-related NGO in Greece, the Athens Refugee Service has participated in multiple phases of the establishment of the Greek asylum system and has witnessed the changing trends and demographics of asylum applications. This history can be traced through a cursory glance at old files in the storage room on the organization’s sixth floor. Files from the early 1990s attest to the many applicants from the then just-dissolved, former Soviet bloc: most were from Poland and Albania, interspersed with applicants from Iraq, Iran, Turkey (primarily Kurds), Somalia, Syria, and Palestine. During the period of my fieldwork, there were few applicants from Eastern Europe and the Balkans, but large numbers from the Middle East and Africa, and many more Iraqis and Afghans. There were also many from Southeast Asia, in particular Pakistan and Bangladesh, who in 2006 accounted for approximately 50 percent of asylum applications.
The ARS was born as a collaborator of the UNHCR. This formal affiliation has since waned, but its traces continue to structure many elements of the ARS. These include the importance of English in many of the official forms and documents, and the interview procedures through which client eligibility is determined, modeled explicitly on UNHCR refugee status determination procedures (discussed in detail in Chapters 3 and 4). Before the 1991 establishment of a nationalized process for accepting refugees, the UNHCR adjudicated asylum applications in Greece, resettling those it recognized as refugees. The ARS assisted applicants with their claims, providing legal support and advice. As the Greek state itself began to process applications, the ARS maintained its role of providing legal support for asylum seekers. Now there is a social service department at the ARS and an entire floor devoted to educational materials, particularly for children. Yet with its strong tradition of providing legal support and casework, the ARS legal service (nomiki ipiresia [νομική υπηρεσία]) fills an important gap in the panorama of legal assistance available to asylum seekers.
While the ARS is devoted primarily to providing support for individual clients, it also engages in what might be called policy advocacy. It is a member of trans-European networks of asylum advocacy NGOs, and among its stated goals, it strives to share experience and know-how for the configuration of better policy internationally. The ARS has also historically tried to maintain a relatively cooperative relationship not just with the UNHCR but with the agencies of the Greek state that come into contact with asylum seekers (the Ministry of Public Order and Citizen Protection, the Athens police, and police in border areas). ARS workers have explained to me that this more cordial relationship with state agencies is necessary for furthering the cases they take on, but it can also translate directly to an engagement in policy making and implementation. Recently, ARS workers gave their input in the formation of the new asylum system, and former staff members have taking on important positions as overseers and asylum adjudicators, working for both the UNHCR and agencies of the state. This close entwinement of the ARS with more governmental roles, particularly through the social networks of current and former workers, is aptly illustrated through the fieldwork that I conducted in 2011 in the asylum department of the Athens police. I acquired access largely through the assistance of former ARS workers, who were employed by the UNHCR to provide advisory opinions at first-instance adjudications. Yet while formally positioned as advisors, this meant that they were ostensibly working alongside the police. My friends and acquaintances in these positions, most from NGO backgrounds, spoke of the new insight this gave into both the asylum process and the psyches of their former “enemies,” so to speak (the police adjudicators). Yet as one of them explained, this “intimacy” can also be troubling, bespeaking a potential conflation of police, NGO, and international human rights interests through the socialities of everyday practice. This ambivalent relationship between NGO and state responsibilities appears throughout this book as a fundamental dilemma of work and life at the ARS.
In the past, I have heard Greek activists and members of migrant and refugee community groups in Athens describe the ARS as somewhat conservative, explicitly referencing the close relationship between the ARS and the state. Some advocates from other European NGOs described the ARS to me as not vocal, active, or activist enough. One advocate from northern Europe explained that he sometimes finds it hard to work with members of the ARS: “They have all of the cases, they know everything,” but, he lamented, “they don’t write about it.” However, as the asylum process has become an object of active reform, the ARS has also become increasingly visible and vocal, collaborating with other Greek and European organizations in exposing and critiquing practices that continue to be problematic, such as the detention of children and poor reception conditions. With the increased incidences of race-related violence that have accompanied the financial crisis, which I address in Chapters 6 and 7, the ARS has also become more active in anti-racism activities and actions.
Some ARS workers, however, have explained that they simply have too many cases to engage deeply in the more political work necessary for changing policy, which is such an important goal for many asylum related NGOs elsewhere in Europe. During an evening gathering at a 2008 NGO conference in Brussels, I asked Nikos, an ARS delegate, how he felt about the policy focus of many of the other NGOs and if he thought the ARS was engaged in “advocacy,” which had been a buzzword at the conference. He paused for a minute as he thought, then answered rhetorically: “What is ‘advocacy’? I don’t think we do ‘advocacy’ ” (Τι είναι advocacy [Δεν νομίζω ότι κάνουμε advocacy]).11 As one of the more experienced lawyers, with fluent knowledge of English and French, Nikos often represented the ARS at such meetings, collaborating with other NGOs and the UNHCR to lobby government representatives in Greece and elsewhere in Europe. In his own commentary, however, he adamantly resisted the project of policy advocacy, despite his evident engagement in this area. Certainly, with the increasing involvement of the NGO sector in the current reform of the Greek asylum system, such attitudes may be changing. Yet Nikos’s response attests to the central, even entrenched, role of individual casework at the ARS over and against policy advocacy.
At this same Brussels conference, a Dutch advocate, trained as a lawyer, commented astutely on the distinction between casework and policy advocacy: “There are two kinds of workers [in asylum-related NGOs] and they operate
