About 2,000 asylum seekers are to be moved out of a severely overcrowded camp on the Greek island of Lesbos this month, a Greek official said on Tuesday as charities criticized conditions at the camp, which has raw sewage running out of its main entrance.
Greek government spokesman Dimitris Tzanakopoulos said those being moved out of the Moria camp, which houses 9,000 people in a facility built for 3,100, are to be sent to the mainland so their asylum claims can be examined.
“The situation in Moria is indeed difficult, it is indeed at the limit,” Tzanakopoulos said.
North Aegean Regional Governor Christina Kalogirou had threatened to shut down the facility unless conditions improved.
Camp resident Ali Sajjad Faizy, a 19-year-old from Afghanistan, said conditions at Moria have steadily worsened and anyone who wants food has to stand in line for many hours.
“It’s completely full,” he said.
Doctors Without Borders has called for the emergency evacuation of vulnerable people at the camp to the mainland and other EU nations, citing an increase in suicide attempts and self-harm among children in Moria and cases of sexual abuse.
“This is the third year that [we] have been calling on the Greek authorities and the EU to take responsibility for their collective failures and to put in place sustainable solutions to avoid this catastrophic situation,” said Louise Roland-Gosselin of Doctors without Borders. “It is time to immediately evacuate the most vulnerable to safe accommodation in other European countries and to stop this never-ending cycle of emergency decongestions and the horrendous conditions we continue to witness in Moria.”
Thousands of people fleeing violence and poverty at home are still arriving at the Greek islands from the nearby Turkish coast.
Between Friday last week and Sunday more than 600 reached Lesbos alone.
Under a 2016 deal between the EU and Turkey designed to halt the flow of refugees and migrants into Europe, those arriving on Greek islands are held in detention camps there and face deportation back to Turkey unless their asylum applications are approved, but the backlog of applications has led to severe overcrowding in the Greek island camps.
“What the Greek government is trying to do is to reduce the time required for a decision to be issued granting — or rejecting — asylum ... but there is always reality,” Tzanakopoulos said.
Anti-immigration policies being pursued by Hungary, Poland and several other EU members had limited Greece’s options to deal with the problem, he said.
“We must all understand that the only way for an overall solution to the immigration crisis is [to achieve] an equal and proportional sharing of refugees throughout Europe,” he said.
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