Is Greece leading the way for the end of asylum in Europe?

In early July, a week after taking office as minister of migration and asylum in Greece, Thanos Plevris posted brief remarks on X in response to a comment by a lawyer.

The lawyer, pointing to an article he had himself written on the subject, had admonished the minister that “if the [1951] Geneva Convention on Refugees is not revised [...], nothing will change!”.

The Greek minister assured him that he had read the article and agreed that, “indeed, the Geneva Convention addressed issues from the 1950s and cannot address the issue in 2025 of massive [migration] flows”.

A few days later, during a debate in parliament on an amendment suspending the registration of asylum applications, Plevris demonstrated his idiosyncratic understanding of the 1951 Refugee Convention and the matters it was intended to regulate.

“The Geneva [Refugee] Convention was created to protect people who were fleeing the Soviet Union”, he declared, to loud applause from the MPs from Greece's centre-right ruling New Democracy party.

His comment was addressed to the leftwing MPs, whose invocations of the convention he considered misguided.

But Plevris did not reveal sources to back up his assertion.

What is certain is that Plevris's declaration is yet another concession by Greece’s government to the far-right.

What were previously marginal positions are increasingly becoming official policy and the subject of polite debate throughout Europe. 

To date, the Athens government's repeated refrain in relation to human rights has been that it always acts within the framework of international law.

It has argued this in response to criticism of its capricious laws to get around the convention (notably including three-month suspensions of asylum applications in March 2020 and again last July) and its systematic violations of the text in practice via its informal 'refoulements' (pushbacks of migrants). 

The government's declarations of respect for international law may be hypocritical, but its actions also demonstrate a distinct political philosophy.

In that vision, the rule of law is being gradually replaced by a regime in which people are arbitrarily deprived of their rights, discriminated against and made to live in intolerable conditions and with no means of protest.

In the past, Strasbourg-based Council of Europe has raised serious concerns about Greece's handling of refugee and migrant rights, particularly regarding border pushbacks and the treatment of children.

Greece’s own revisionists

The few articles published in the Greek press in support of revising the convention make it clear what political agenda they serve.

In a piece entitled “The Geneva Convention on Refugees — a back door to illegal immigration”, posted on 16 June 2020 on the website of the Union of Greek Lawyers, Ioannis Gkitsakis, a jurist at Greece's supreme court, describes the 1951 convention as outdated. 

He cites a number of reasons, including that it does not allow for the suspension of its application; that it does not prevent the submission of asylum applications by those who are not entitled to international protection; that it provides for individual examination of each application and forbids grouped rejections of applications “submitted by several persons from the same country of origin, which is considered a safe country”; and that it outlaws “collective measures, such as mass expulsions or refoulements [...] against persons who share common characteristics, such as a common country of origin or a common mode of illegal entry”.

A post by the Greek lawyer Ioannis Gitsakis on X dispels any doubts about his motives: “Anyone who enters the country illegally has no right to apply for asylum. They must be held in a closed detention centre (or on a deserted island, a decommissioned ship, or a rented facility in Africa), without receiving benefits, until they are deported or leave voluntarily!”

In other posts, he refers to “illegal Muslim immigrants”, the woke and LGBTQI agenda; the need to reinstate the death penalty; Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who “took it upon himself to clean up the entire planet”; and EAM, Greece's wartime anti-Nazi resistance movement, which “was simply a murderous failed communist organisation”.

In an article published on Capital.gr on 24 September 2024 entitled “Will we let 'Geneva' destroy Europe?”, the author Thanos Tzimeros, the businessman who founded the party Dimiourgia Xana (Recreate Greece), seconds Gitsakis’s article.

After referring, among other things, to “cannibalistic tribes” in Africa and “invaders” with a “primitive tradition of violence [...] written in their genes”, Tzimeros concludes that states have the right to close borders via refoulements, as well as to make “arrests, imprisonments, and deportations”, and to use live gunfire. “[The state] decides for itself. Not well-fed UN bureaucrats. Nor the 1951 Geneva Convention. The convention must be revised yesterday.”

The head of Greece’s Asylum Service, Marios Kaleas, came out in favour of revising the 1951 convention in an article in Vima on 22 October entitled “Reassessing the Geneva Convention in a new era of migration”.

Without resorting to extreme language, Kaleas criticises the document for, among other things, not providing for mechanisms to return those who are not entitled to international protection, and for its “rigid legal scope [which] has created room for divergent national interpretations and procedural inconsistencies”.

What is the Refugee Convention?

The Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees establishes the post-war asylum system and defines the obligations of states to protect refugees. Its basic principle is non-refoulement, which prohibits the expulsion of refugees to a country where their life or freedom is threatened.

The convention was signed in Geneva in July 1951 by 24 countries and has since been ratified by 145 UN member states. In its original form, it provided protection for refugees who had left European countries before 1951.

Later, with a 1967 protocol, the convention was extended to cover refugees from across the world without any time limit. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees is the guardian of the convention in cooperation with UN member states.

This article was first published by Efsyn. The piece was produced as part of the European PULSE project, in which Efsyn participates. Adrian Burtin (Voxeurop – France), Nikola Lalov (Mediapool – Bulgaria), and Ana Somavilla (El Confidencial – Spain) contributed to it.