While the deal has limited the flow, people still arrive and around 11,000 are stranded on a handful of eastern Aegean islands, most housed in overcrowded detention camps.
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Overcrowding in Greek migrant camps is putting thousands of Syrian children at risk, a charity group said yesterday, as the coast guard reported hundreds of rescues in the last nine days.
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Although the EU-Turkey agreement has brought about a drastic reduction in the number of arrivals, both Greece and the EU fear a renewed increase as Turkey carries out a crackdown on officials following a failed July 15 coup.
“We’re almost back at square one”.
“The number of arrivals in Greece (have) doubled since the start of the summer and this is particularly worrying because we see already overstretched facilities, really stretched to a breaking point on the islands of Chios and Samos and Lesbos, where we are operating”, explained Jacqueline Hale, from Save the Children. Around 3,800 of those stranded on the islands are children. Save The Children warned that refugee women and children were living in “demoralising and unsafe conditions”.
Save the Children’s director of operations in Greece, Katie Dimmer, described the conditions at the camps to the BBC.
The figure is far below the thousands who arrived daily at the height of the massive wave of migration seen past year, but is triple the daily average in July. Many of them have officially applied for asylum.
Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron said: “Only 20 of the 88,000 unaccompanied child refugees in Europe have been allowed into the UK”.
Mr Farron added: ‘This is a stain on the conscience of Theresa May and it is a stain on Britain’s reputation’.
Although the average daily arrivals on the islands in August have increased to 90 from 56 in May, the numbers are still drastically lower than previous year, when 107,843 migrants and asylum seekers arrived in August.
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Concerns have been raised that if Turkey fails to stem the flow the European Union will refuse to relax visa rules by October, threatening the whole deal.
