20.06.2022 PAGE 3 ACCESS TO HEALTH CARE Secondly, access to healthcare - a fundamental right enshrined in international, European, and Greek [3] law has been repeatedly violated over the last months. The EU-funded Philos program, a healthcare program for asylum seekers and refugees in Greece, was scheduled to expire at the end of February 2022. It was only thanks to political pressure that the programme was renewed until the end of 2022. Nevertheless, during the month of March 2022, no doctor from EODY, the National Public Health Organization, was operating in the CCAC. Since then, temporary responses have been found with doctors being present in the facility only for a few days a week. However, as Prince*[4], an asylum seeker who has been living in the Samos CCAC since its opening last September, rightly points out, even “with only one doctor operating in the facility, I think there will always be people who won't have access to medical care”. Besides, there are serious concerns over the continuation of the Philos program given it only got extended until the end of the year, with seemingly no clear future plan in sight in Samos. While it remains unknown when a sustainable solution will be found, most camp residents explain that they prefer seeing a doctor from MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières), which is currently operating a mobile clinic in the camp to compensate for this gap. Not only does the absence of a doctor in the camp prevent CCAC residents from accessing adequate and timely health care, it also hinders the vulnerability assessment. This forces many asylum seekers to undergo the asylum procedure without proper prior identification of vulnerability, which is necessary to obtain the lift of the geographical restriction and a transfer on the mainland. This issue, which emerged recently, only adds to the pre-existing factors that were hindering the resident’s access to health care and the local hospital: long waiting times, lack of dedicated transport to the hospital, and lack of knowledge and training of the medical staff on specific issues such as female genital mutilation (FGM). [3] Article 33 of L 4368/2016 states that the Greek Public Health System has to ensure the right of free access to health care for all refugees, asylum seekers and beneficiaries of international protection, as well as people living in Greece on humanitarian grounds *[4] All names in this report have been changed to protect the person’s identity LIFE IN THE CLOSED CONTROLLED ACCESS CENTRE IN SAMOS