This report shows that, over one year following the establishment of a long-awaited new system
for accessing the asylum procedure on the mainland, these same issues persist.
2023 has seen a spike in arrivals to Greece at the same time as drastic cuts to services and
provision for asylum seekers and refugees.⁶ Already by early November 2023, UNHCR had
recorded 38,448 irregular arrivals via Greece’s land and sea borders this year,⁷ an increase of
over 19,000 compared to the whole of 2022. Despite claims by the Greek Minister of Migration⁸
that irregular arrivals are reducing or non-existent, this is likely to only represent a fraction of
those trying to reach Greece considering the systematic practice of pushbacks from Greece to
Turkey.⁹ Persistent underfunding of Greece’s asylum and reception systems has greatly hindered
the ability to ensure effective access to the procedure in times of high arrivals and provide
dignified living conditions for all asylum seekers. These critical deficiencies have been highlighted
by workers of Greece’s Asylum Service¹⁰ and Reception and Identification Service¹¹ this year, who
raised their voices against long-standing under-resourcing and precarious working conditions. In
October 2023, the mainland reception system reached capacity, with reports of recognised
refugees forced to sleep rough in Athens.¹² In the same month, the provider of interpretation
services to all of Greece’s asylum procedures released a statement¹³ announcing sweeping cuts
to its services due to months of non-payment by the MoMA, drastically impacting provision of
information and processing of claims on the mainland. The policy developments analysed in this
report should be understood in the context of these larger crises within the management of
Greece’s asylum system.
This report is divided into five chapters. The Policy and Legal Background chapter outlines policy
changes leading to the introduction of mandatory reception and identification procedures on the
Greek mainland as well as the relevant legal frameworks. The second chapter provides brief site
profiles of the Mainland Reception Facilities of Diavata and Malakasa. Chapter three analyses
Barriers to Accessing the Procedure - including persistent issues with the online platform for
requesting appointments and the location and accessibility of the mainland RICs. The fourth
chapter, Excluded from Support and Protection, considers the impact of exclusion from the
asylum system, examining how denial of access to material reception conditions, healthcare and
legal protections pushes people into a precarious existence in Greece while they await the
registration of their asylum claim. In chapter five, The Reception and Identification Procedure,
we analyse the experiences of people undergoing the screening procedures within the mainland
RICs while under a regime of de facto detention. At the end we outline the key Conclusions and
Recommendations to the Greek state and European Commission arising from this research.
9