third country with the European Union, as well as internal practice)” taken into account for the adoption of a JMD designating a country as a “safe third country”, must be “up to date and come from credible sources of information, in particular from official domestic and foreign diplomatic sources, EASO, the legislation of the other Member States in relation to the concept of safe third countries, the Council of Europe, and UNHCR. The European Commission shall be informed of any decision designating a country as a safe third country. The European Commission has expressly stated that:818 ‘Article 12(1)(d) of Directive 2013/32/EU provides that such information, when taken into account by the deciding authority, should also be accessible to the applicant and his/her legal advisers. To the extent Opinion 8815/14.05.2021 of the Director of the Asylum Service contains information referred to in Article 10(3)(b) of Directive 2013/32/EU, and the deciding authority takes the opinion into account for the purpose of taking a decision on an application for international protection, it should be made accessible to the applicant and his/her legal advisers’. Contrary to Article 91(3) of the Asylum Code, the Opinion was simply a compilation of sources of information about Türkiye and contains no legal reasoning as to why this information leads to the conclusion that Türkiye is a safe third country for asylum applicants from the five countries concerned. In fact, the sources mentioned in the “Opinion” seem to rather substantiate the opposite conclusion. Finally, it should be mentioned that the “Opinion” has still not been published by the authorities nor is it included as part of the applicants’ file in the inadmissibility decisions.819 As a result, since the entry into force of the JMDs, the applications lodged by those nationals of these countries can be rejected as "inadmissible" without their applications being examined on their merits. The criteria provided by the Asylum Code are to be assessed in each individual case, except where a third country has been declared as generally safe in the national list. 820 Such provision seems to derogate from the duty to carry out an individualised assessment of the safety criteria where the applicant comes from a country included in the list of “safe third countries”, contrary to the Directive and to international law. Even where a country has been designated as generally safe, the authorities should conduct an individualised examination of the fulfilment of the safety criteria. Moreover, there should be a possibility to challenge both the general designation of a country as safe and the application of the concept in an individual case.821 Application of the designation in practice Prior to any analysis of the statistics, it must be noted that ‘[full and transparent publication of asylum statistics has been a core demand of MPs and civil society in Greece from the re-establishment of the Ministry of Migration and Asylum to present […] monthly reports of the Ministry of Migration and Asylum do not disaggregate first and second instance decisions by country of origin. However, detailed figures by country and type of decisions have been secured through parliamentary questions.822 According to MoMA statistics, during 2024, a total of 3,310 inadmissibility decisions were issued pursuant to JMD 734214/06.12.2022. These include 2,143 first-instance inadmissibility decisions and 1,142 second-instance inadmissibility decisions. Of the latter, 1,132 inadmissibility decisions were issued under the border procedure based on the 'safe third country' concept, 11 inadmissibility decisions under the border procedure concerning Albania as a 'safe third country,' and 24 inadmissibility decisions under the border procedure concerning North Macedonia as a 'safe third country.823 Up until the end of 2020, the safe third country concept was only applied in the context of the Fast-Track Border Procedure under Article 84 IPA, previously in force, to those who entered Greece after 20 March 2016 via the Greek Aegean islands and under a measure of geographical restriction. It should be noted that the concept was only applied to Syrian nationals. 818 819 820 821 822 823 European Commission, Reply to parliamentary question E-3532/2021, 4 October 2021, available at: https://bit.ly/3NimFGj. Equal Rights Beyond Borders, HIAS Greece and RSA, The state of the Border Procedure on the Greek islands, September 2022, available at: https://bit.ly/3VbNjU5, pp. 19-20. Article 91(2) of the Asylum Code. RSA, RSA Comments on the International Protection Bill, October 2019, available at: https://bit.ly/3eqsDC0, pp. 4-5. RSA, The Greek asylum procedure in figures in 2022, Analysis of main trends in refugee protection, available at: https://bit.ly/4482hhP, p. 2. MoMA, Statistics, available at: https://bit.ly/4arfSEx, 7-8. 160