Greece’s migration minister recently said Athens does not share common values with ‘hardcore Islam’.
Athens, Greece – Bashir is a Syrian Muslim who has lived in Greece since 2014. He married a fellow Syrian in the country, and three months ago, they had a son. After years of picking olives and oranges, learning Greek and a trade in metalwork, and finally buying his own equipment to start work as an independent trader, Bashir felt his life was finally coming together.
Two months ago, the authorities handed him a piece of paper asking him to restate his reasons for coming to Greece and why he should now return to Syria.
Bashir, who requested to withhold his surname, had been granted asylum in Greece in 2015 because of the civil war then raging in Syria. The war ended in December 2024, and Bashir became one of 1,200 Syrians whose asylum cases were reopened in February.
“It’s a catastrophe,” he told Al Jazeera. “I don’t understand how this can happen. If they decide I should leave the country, should my family stay here?”
Bashir’s lawyer said only men are currently receiving such notices – and not just from Syria but Afghanistan, another country whose civil war is deemed to have ended, with the Taliban’s sweeping victory in August 2021.
But neither Syria nor Afghanistan is necessarily safe to return to, said the lawyer, Angeliki Theodoropoulou, who works for the Greek Council for Refugees (GCR), the country’s primary legal aid group for asylum-seekers.
“We believe this has to do with the European Union’s stance towards Syria and Afghanistan, and with the fact that there are quite a few voluntary returns, which encourages authorities to say, ‘Let’s see if these people can return’,” Theodoropoulou told Al Jazeera.
n Athens.
The largest bottleneck, she said, “is that Europe has not yet figured out how to do returns at scale … in order to reform asylum and reform migration, you have to execute returns at scale, and the data show that that has been impossible”.
Greece, an EU front-line state, already has 938,000 legally resident migrants in a population of 10.3 million, a relatively high number. Of these, more than 137,000 are recipients of asylum or international protection.
As the Middle East and North Africa region remains unstable, the government is worried about the potential scale of future refugee flows.
More than a million asylum seekers crossed the Greek borders in 2015. In the years that followed, certain EU members took on thousands of asylum cases from Greece and Italy in a show of solidarity, and tens of thousands more asylum recipients in Greece moved to other EU states. Those states have agreed to keep them, but that would not necessarily happen again under the pact.
Observers say this explains Greece’s hardline attitude.
Commenting on the political mood in Europe, Fabbe said, “The legality, the sanctity of the [returns] solutions is being challenged, but I think we’re going to see the proliferation of those solutions and new institutional mechanisms.”