Legal assistance Indicators: - Do asylum seekers have access to free legal assistance at first instance in the border procedure in practice? Yes not always/with difficulty No Do asylum seekers have access to free legal assistance in the appeal procedure against a decision taken under a border procedure? Yes not always/with difficulty No In practice, free legal assistance is not provided in the border procedure. 6. Accelerated procedures General (scope, grounds for accelerated procedures, time limits) According to Article 17 (3) of the P.D. 114/10, applications for international protection shall be examined in the accelerated procedure when they are manifestly unfounded or when the applicant is a national of a safe country of origin or comes from a safe third country. The examination of asylum applications is conducted by a police officer and shall be concluded within three months when the accelerated procedure is applied. An application shall be considered to be manifestly unfounded when the applicant: a. invokes reasons that are manifestly irrelevant to refugee or subsidiary protection status OR b. has filed the application for abusive reasons or intentionally tried to mislead authorities. Not meeting the three month deadline has no consequences. Indeed, the backlog of pending cases remains quite heavy although reducing it is one of the aims foreseen in the Greek Action Plan. In practice, sometimes asylum applications are examined in the accelerated procedure even if they should have been examined with the regular procedure and vice-versa. The Greek Council for Refugees has had many cases where applications of people from Afghanistan, Somalia and even Syria are being processed according to the accelerated procedure even though it is obvious that these people may be in need of international protection, thus greatly compromising their rights. In both accelerated procedures and border procedures the authority who is responsible for taking the first instance decision is the Territorially Competent Police Director/The police Directors of the Aliens Directorate of Athens and Thessaloniki and the Police Director of the Athens International Airport (accelerated procedure/inadmissible applications). At the time of writing this report no detailed statistics were available indicating the percentage of cases that has been examined in an accelerated procedure. Appeal Indicators: - Does the law provide for an appeal against a decision taken in an accelerated procedure? Yes No o if yes, is the appeal: judicial administrative o If yes, is it suspensive? Yes No Applicants appealing under the accelerated procedure face the same problems as mentioned above in the regular procedure. 28