(b) The asylum applicant interview may also be conducted by Greek-speaking personnel deployed by EUAA. However, Article 95(3) Asylum Code has maintained the possibility, “in particularly urgent circumstances”, for the interview to be conducted by trained personnel of the Hellenic Police or the Armed Forces, as long as they have received specific training. (c) The asylum procedure shall be concluded in a short time period. This may –and often does– result in compromising the procedural guarantees provided by the international, EU and national legal frameworks, including the right to be assisted by a lawyer. Extremely brief time limits significantly affect the procedural guarantees to which asylum applicants are entitled in a fast-track procedure and, therefore, there should be an assessment of their conformity with Article 43 of the recast Asylum Procedures Directive (APD), which provides that restrictions on procedural rights in a border procedure cannot be imposed for reasons related to large numbers of arrivals. More precisely, according to Article 95(3)(c) Asylum Code: ❖ the Asylum Service shall issue a first instance decision within seven days; ❖ the deadline for the submission of an appeal against a negative decision is ten days; ❖ the deadline for the submission of an appeal does not always have an automatic suspensive effect, as provided by Article 110 (3) Asylum Code, and a separate application for suspension of removal needs to be submitted before the Appeals Authority, within the deadline for the submission of the appeal; ❖ the examination of an appeal shall be carried out within four days. The appellant is notified within one day to appear for a hearing before the Appeals’ Committees or to submit supplementary evidence; and ❖ the second instance decision shall be issued within seven days. It should be noted that these very short time limits seem to be exclusively at the expense of applicants for international protection in practice. In fact, whereas timelines are, as a general principle, not compulsory for the authorities and case processing at the borders takes several months on average, applicants still have to comply with the very short time limits provided by Article 95(3) Asylum Code. 571 In 2024, official data regarding the average time between the full registration of the asylum application and the issuance of a first instance decision under the fast-track border procedure was not available. In 2025, the fast-track border procedure continued being variably implemented depending on the profile and nationality of the asylum applicants concerned (see also Differential Treatment of Specific Nationalities in the Procedure). Yet as in previous years,572 specific data on in-merit and inadmissibility decisions issued by the Asylum Service under this procedure have not been made available by the MoMA for 2025. To be noted, the procedure continued being applied despite the lack of any reasonable prospect of return to Türkiye, as is well known by the Greek authorities: ❖ In October 2021, notes by the Readmission Unit of the Hellenic Police Headquarters confirmed that Türkiye has indefinitely suspended returns from Greece since 16 March 2020. Due to this suspension, the Greek authorities stopped sending readmission requests to Türkiye based on the Common EU- Türkiye Statement for rejected asylum seekers.573 ❖ According to MoMA’s Report 2024: ‘Returns under the EU - Turkey Joint Declaration have not been made since March 2020 due to Covid-19. It should be noted that despite the lifting of the 571 572 573 FRA, Update of the 2016 FRA Opinion on fundamental rights in the hotspots set up in Greece and Italy, 5 March 2019, available at: https://bit.ly/2HeRg79, p. 26. For more, see relevant AIDA reports on Greece, available here. Fenix, Fenix calls the Greek authorities to examine the merits of asylum applications rejected on admissibility, 6 December 2021, available at: https://bit.ly/3wUxsyN. 125