UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s visit to Greece on 17-18 June to express solidarity with the thousands of refugees and migrants trapped there should lead to the fatally flawed EU-Turkey migration deal being scrapped, Amnesty International said.
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The idea was borne out of a visit last summer of one of the founders, 20-year-old Alexandros Angelopoulos, to the island of Samos, one of the entry points into Europe for almost a million people fleeing wars and poverty in the Middle East and beyond.
Ban Ki-moon (L) wears a life jacket he received from Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras (R), after a press conference following their meeting in Athens on June 18, 2016..
“Despite the country’s own economic difficulties, Greece has been generous in saving human lives”.
According to United Nations figures, Lesbos alone accounted for around 500,000 arrivals in 2015.
Most of the migrants are now in state-run camps that aid groups including the UN’s refugee agency have labelled poorly-equipped and inappropriate for a long stay.
Amnesty’s Giorgos Kosmopoulos (https://twitter.com/GiorgosKosmop) has made several trips to Lesbos and Chios – including inside the Moria and VIAL detention centres – since the EU-Turkey deal came into effect.
Some 3,400 of the 57,000 people stuck in Greece live in refugee camps on Lesbos.
Human rights activists have criticized the deal, saying that refugees face poor treatment in Turkey and that the arrangement endorsed by the European Union treats those fleeing war and other hardships like pawns in a political chess game.
Over the past few months, Ban Ki-moon and other senior United Nations representatives have voiced concern over the EU-Turkey agreement, which have allowed for the potential forced return of thousands of refugees from Greece to Turkey.
“We must work together to protect people and address the causes of displacement”.
“It’s a symbolic gift, a life-saving tool for thousands of refugees who arrived in the Greek islands after crossing the Aegean Sea”, Tsipras said in presenting the item to him.
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Since the beginning of the year, more than 2,500 people have died in the Mediterranean compared with 1,855 in the same period last year, according to the International Organization for Migration.
