It has now been 9 days since we had a boat landing on the
north coast and I am busier than ever! Since we haven't been receiving
boats, I've been reading a lot about EU asylum procedures,
qualifications, and returns in my tent at night and I've been making
more trips to Moria with my guitar in the daytime. Some really magical
things are coming together.
Last week I met an incredible group of people who fled
political violence in their home country. This was on the one day when I
left in a hurry without my guitar and one of these new friends told me I
needed to come back and bring it with me because everyone where they
come from is a singer. We spent most of the next day singing in the
shade of an olive tree that straddles the fence line of the detention
camp and shared a beautiful musical moment that brought us closer
together. In between songs they told me bits and pieces of stories that
reflected the very reasons why the international community felt
compelled to protect human dignity with legal instruments like the
Geneva Convention or the European Convention on Human Rights. And in
spite of horrible experiences like kidnapping, torture, murder, and now
this seemingly indefinite detention that none of us understood, we were
smiling, laughing, singing, dancing, clapping, tapping and whistling
out all the parts we couldn't remember in an olive grove on a Greek
island thousands of miles away from home.
The next day I got wind of a couple human rights lawyers
coming to the island for the weekend with the intention of talking to
asylum applicants about their cases. I tried and failed to put them in
touch with my friends on the other side of the fence. But I did manage
to pin them down for long enough to grill them about most of the aspects
of EU asylum law that might help to clarify what advice we can give to
people in Moria and they gave me a lot of homework that helped me
understand what on earth is going on there. You will not be surprised to
learn that it has a lot to do with the EU-Turkey agreement!
The EU-Turkey agreement declares Turkey to be a first
country of asylum for Syrians and a safe third country for everyone else
who entered the EU irregularly from there. According to the EU returns
directive, Greece can declare asylum claims of applicants to be
inadmissable if they come through such a place and it has the right to
detain applicants for up to 6 months while it is taking steps toward
their expulsion. Because mass deportations are indiscriminate in nature
and therefore illegal, Greece is required to give each applicant a
personal interview in a language they understand in order to assess the
circumstances of their particular case; to give them a chance to review
the transcript of this interview and the contents of their submission;
and to submit an appeal if they are rejected or only granted subsidiary
protection rather than refugee status. For non-Syrians, expulsion is
automatically suspended while this process takes place, while Syrians
need to ask for this specifically since they are presumed to have
already received protection from Turkey. This has important implications
for understanding Moria and other Greek detention centres but even more
so for the asylum applicants who entered Greece irregularly after the
entry-into-force of the EU-Turkey deal.
For the detention centres, it means they are legal as long
as they are not found to be violating the European Convention on Human
Rights. Given the extremely limited access to the detention facilities
and the fact that many of the major NGOs who would normally be inside
documenting these violations have pulled out in a political protest to
the EU-Turkey deal, it is incredibly likely that these humanitarian
concerns will start to be addressed after people start dying or when
tensions boil over into chaos.
For the refugees, it means that it's incredibly important
for them to understand that the asylum interviews that they are
anxiously waiting to be called to are not an opportunity to tell Greek
authorities why they think they should be allowed into their country.
The interviews are a procedural safeguard in the deportation process
that gives them an opportunity to identify exceptional circumstances
which are particular to them and which render their impending
deportation illegal. It is their chance to prove that Turkey is an
unsafe place for them in particular or that, given the good chance of
their being sent back to their home country from Turkey, the real and
ongoing threat against them there is sufficient to warrant international
protection.
Before Moria was turned into a detention centre, the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was helping asylum applicants to
tell their stories in a way that made sure they would not overlook any
important details, but they have also pulled a lot of their services out
of Lesbos to protest the EU-Turkey deal. My understanding is that they
are present in Moria only as observers now. Today I was told that the
advice oneperson got from them was to apply for asylum, which is great
advice but not very thorough. In any case, literally none of the
detainees who I have spoken to has had a clear idea of why they were
imprisoned, how long they would be there or what would happen in their
interview. So now I'm really excited to have a day job and it is
this undercover hippie legal service that accidentally sprang to life
over the course of the last week. Today I gave my nee friends 10 empty
notebooks, a bunch of pens and the best legal advice I could muster
about how to prepare for their asylum interviews. My boss told me that
he would give me 500 more notebooks so we can work a little bit faster!
The human rights lawyers from this weekend are coming back this week, so
I'm hoping they can follow up with everyone. And now that I'm all fired
up about it, I'm pretty dead set on finding a way to walk into Moria
through the front door with the permission of the Greek Interior
Ministry because it just seems absurd that anyone should object to the
distribution of office supplies. I will keep you posted on it how that
goes.
