Expulsion of asylum seekers to Greece ‘illegal’

Human rights court ruling seen as blow to EU’s Dublin II asylum regulation.

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Belgium should not have deported an asylum seeker to Greece under a European Union mechanism known as Dublin II.

This was the court’s first judgment on the Dublin II regulation, under which EU member states are allowed to deport asylum seekers to the member state they entered first and where they are then supposed to have their asylum case heard.

Since the EU has made efforts to block maritime migration routes, most illegal migrants – a group that includes people fleeing persecution as well as economic migrants – enter the EU through Greece’s land border with Turkey. EU guards were deployed to the border in November to try to stop illegal migration. Around 7,000 asylum seekers faced expulsion to Greece in 2010 under the Dublin II mechanism, according to reports.

In today’s ruling, the Court found Belgium and Greece had violated articles 3 and 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which deal with the prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and the right to an effective remedy.

Greece violated the convention because of detention conditions and deficiencies in its asylum procedure. Belgium’s violation was for exposing the plaintiff – an Afghan national – to these conditions. The court also found that Belgium had violated the convention by denying the applicant an effective remedy against his expulsion order.

The Court has around 960 cases pending that relate to the Dublin regulation, against the Netherlands, Finland, Belgium, the United Kingdom and France, most of them concerning expulsions to Greece. The Court has ordered the temporary suspension of transfer orders in 531 cases.

Greece has been at the centre of criticism from human rights groups and the Council of Europe, an intergovernmental human rights watchdog, for the detention conditions of migrants. At least half a million asylum seekers are thought to be living in Greece without any legal status. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has said that the Greek asylum system has “collapsed”.

Germany stopped sending asylum seekers back to Greece on Wednesday (19 January), officially in order not to impose further burdens on the Greek asylum system. Media reports suggest that the suspension may be in response to a case before the country’s Constitutional Court that is similar to the case on which the European Court of Human Rights ruled today.

Manfred Weber, the German deputy leader of the centre-right European People’s Party group in the European Parliament, said after today’s ruling: “The European Commission must no longer close its eyes to the abuses in the implementation of EU asylum standards. Commissioner [Cecilia] Malmström has for too long been twiddling her thumbs. What is required now is decisive action.”

Weber added: “Dublin II is a functioning system and the backbone of the EU’s asylum policy. But we need to put an end to a situation where many EU member states fail to implement the common standards.”

Bjarte Vandvik, secretary general of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, said that the ruling was a “major blow” to the Dublin system. “The assumption that all  EU member states respect fundamental rights and that it is therefore safe to automatically transfer asylum seekers between EU countries no longer stands,” he said.