Some 114 totally uncontrolled NGOs have deployed an army of more than 7000 volunteers since 2016 on the Greek Island of Lesbos alone, according to Greek news outlet Protothema.

Athens

The alarming number of volunteers aiding migrants came to light after Greek MP Charalampos Athanassiou questioned the Minister of Shipping and the Minister of Immigration Policy in the Hellenic Parliament.

The two ministers revealed that no authority was actually supervising these actions. They have tried to blame each other for the lack of oversight. But the fingerpointing could not disguise the fact that he NGOs in Greece are out of control.

In a move designed to decongest its overcrowded island camps, the government in Athens approved a new law designed to speed up the country’s notoriously slow asylum process.

The North Eastern Aegean islands are the so-called hotspots, especially the islands of Lesbos, Chios and Samos.

Under the new legislation, more staff will be recruited at Greece’s asylum service to handle the thousands of requests, while the appeals process for rejected applications will be shortened. It also includes travel restrictions which can be imposed on asylum-seekers who get moved from the islands to the mainland.

In addition, the new law should also speed up, and increase the number of, deportations of people back to Turkey who are no eligible for asylum. As the law currently stood, restrictions on asylum-seekers were limited mainly to the five islands near the coast of Turkey, as this is where strained refugee camps are still trying to cope with up to three times more residents than existing capacity. A total of over 16 000 migrants remain stranded there.

A group of 15 Greek and international human rights organisations, however, have accused the government of “ignoring refugee rights” and urged the state to “immediately reverse” the part about shortening the appeal process. “This new policy is the latest in a series of steps being taken to make access to asylum in Europe more difficult, as outlined in numerous NGO reports,” said a joint statement led by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The country is struggling to cope with a recent spike in arrivals on the islands and via the northern Evros border with Turkey too.