followed by release and an administrative expulsion order requesting the migrant leaves
voluntarily the country within 30 days. Migrants would usually move to Athens and from there
disperse to urban and rural centres in search of jobs, or the harbors of Patra and Igoumenitsa in
the hope of hiding in one of the ferries and cargo ships, heading to Italy. The volume of arrivals
(see Table 1) was unmatched in terms of police and coastguard resources.
Table 1: Apprehensions (all areas)
Total
apprehensions
2008
2009
146.337
2010
126.145
132.524
Greece attempted to deal with the maritime arrivals through fencing and gate-keeping6. The
country requested European assistance as early as 2006, when the first Joint Operation (JO) by
Frontex7-code named Poseidon- took place. JO Poseidon has since become permanent and in
2011 extended to include also Crete as well as the waters between Italy and Greece. Frontex’s
presence in Greece solidified through the establishment of the Operational Office in Piraeus.
On the diplomatic front, Greece signed in 2002 the Readmission Protocol with Turkey, the main
transit country for irregular arrivals from Africa and Asia. Turkey, in practice, places geographical
limitations to the Protocol, willing to accept only nationals of countries with direct borders to
Turkey8. This automatically limited significantly the number of potential returnees, as is evident
from the readmission requests and their acceptance rate by Turkey (see Table 2 below).
6
Triandafyllidou A and Ambrosini M. (2011) “Irregular Immigration Control in Italy and Greece: Strong Fencing
and Weak Gate-keeping serving the Labour Market”, European Journal of Migration and Law , 13 (3).
7
European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member
States of the European Union, hereafter Frontex.
8
Turkey in 2012 refused also to accept readmission requests for Syrian nationals, and despite a readmission
protocol with Pakistan it also refuses to accept readmission requests for Pakistani nationals.
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