Category Archives: Greece

Revealed: 2,000 refugee deaths linked to illegal EU pushbacks

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A Guardian analysis finds EU countries used brutal tactics to stop nearly 40,000 asylum seekers crossing borders

EU member states have used illegal operations to push back at least 40,000 asylum seekers from Europe’s borders during the pandemic, methods being linked to the death of more than 2,000 people, the Guardian can reveal.

In one of the biggest mass expulsions in decades, European countries, supported by EU’s border agency Frontex, has systematically pushed back refugees, including children fleeing from wars, in their thousands, using illegal tactics ranging from assault to brutality during detention or transportation.

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How continental Europe is emerging from Covid lockdown

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Countries across Europe are starting to relax coronavirus restrictions as case numbers fall

Counting on an accelerating vaccination campaign to keep new infections in check, much of continental Europe has announced plans for a gradual exit from lockdown over the coming weeks as case numbers begin to fall. Here is where things stand:

Belgium (at least one vaccine dose administered to 25% of whole population) aims to permit outside dining in restaurants and bars again on 8 May, with a mandatory 10pm closing time and tables limited to groups of four. Non-essential shops and hairdressers reopened on Monday.

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Golden Dawn MEP Ioannis Lagos arrested in Brussels

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Former leader of neo-Nazi party convicted in absentia in 2020 faces extradition to Athens

When the authorities caught up with Ioannis Lagos, they caught up with him fast. The MEP, once a feared leader of Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, has been arrested hours after he was stripped of his immunity as an elected member of the European parliament and told he would be extradited to Athens.

Seized in his Brussels home on Tuesday, the convicted lawmaker had been sentenced to 13 years after a Greek court determined at the end of a landmark trial in 2020 that Golden Dawn was a criminal organisation masquerading as a political party.

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UK accused of stranding vulnerable refugees after Brexit

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Exclusive: Torture survivors and lone children stuck in Greece and Italy after Home Office ‘deliberately’ ends cooperation on family reunions

The Home Office has been accused of failing to reunite vulnerable refugees who have the right to join family in the UK under EU law, leaving lone children and torture survivors stranded.

The government faced widespread criticism when it announced that family reunion law would no longer apply after the UK left the EU, and it promised that cases under way on that date would be allowed to proceed.

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Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders to hold talks on resuming peace process

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UN-led meeting in Geneva aims to re-energise efforts to end dispute four years after talks collapsed

Leaders from either side of Cyprus’s ethnic divide have flown to Geneva for a UN-led summit aimed at exploring whether the time is ripe to resume the peace process four years after the collapse of talks to reunify the island.

The foreign ministers of Greece, Turkey and Britain – Cyprus’s three guarantor powers – will join Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot teams in the hope of re-energising efforts to end the west’s longest-running dispute.

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Yemen, Myanmar and George Floyd: human rights this fortnight in pictures

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A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Cambodia to Peru

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EU states begin using single-dose J&J Covid vaccine

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Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus jab rolled out after backing from European Medicines Agency

EU member states are starting to administer Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine after Europe’s drug regulator this week backed the single-dose shot, with several expected to impose age restrictions, as with the AstraZeneca jab.

Spain’s regional health authorities began using the shot on Thursday for people aged 70 to 79, two days after the European Medicines Agency (EMA) announced a possible link to a rare clotting disorder but stressed the shot’s benefits outweighed the risks.

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‘I was alone, I had nothing’: from child refugee to student nurse in Athens

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Ahtisham Khan arrived in Greece, aged 16, after leaving Pakistan. A new initiative is helping children like him find a safe home where they can start to rebuild their lives

At some point in his journey to a freer place, Ahtisham Khan came to a fork in the road. Fifty days of travel from his native Pakistan to the plains of northern Greece had been unexpectedly frightening and exhausting.

“We had a lot of dreams,” he says, recalling why he and his brother, Zeeshan, left their village close to the city of Haripur in Pakistan. “We were teenagers … we didn’t know what we were embarking on. We did what we had to do to survive.”

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Revealed: Lord Byron’s £4,000 cheque that helped create modern Greece

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The poet’s generosity 200 years ago helped to pave the way to independence, and he is still seen as a hero

Racked by fever, prone to fits of delirium, consumed by his last great passion – the liberation of Greece – Lord Byron lay on his sickbed. It was 18 April 1824. The great Romantic poet would be dead the next day.

“I have given her [Greece] my time, my means, my health,” he is recorded as saying in a moment of lucidity. “And now I give her my life! What could I do more?”

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‘Worrying picture’: Journalists in Europe face increasing risk, press freedom group warns

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Reporters Without Borders speaks of pressures on press freedom after murder of Giorgos Karaivaz in Athens last week

The murder of a high-profile Greek journalist last week marks the fourth killing of a reporter in Europe in the past five years and has underlined growing concerns about a steady decline of press freedoms in several EU member states.

Related: Greek crime journalist shot dead in Athens in ‘execution-style’ murder

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‘This is all we could get’: Dutch tourists arrive in Rhodes for locked-down holiday

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In experiment organised by Dutch government, travellers will have to take regular Covid tests and are barred from leaving resort

A regime that might, in more normal times, resemble a boot camp has been happily embraced by 189 Dutch tourists who traded lockdown in the Netherlands for eight days of voluntary confinement at a Greek beach resort.

In an experiment devised by travel industry experts determined not to lose another season to Covid-19, the tourists arrived on the Aegean island of Rhodes on Monday as part of a test run to see if safe holidays can be arranged during the pandemic.

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Greek crime journalist shot dead in Athens in ‘execution-style’ murder

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Government says killing of Giorgos Karaivaz, reportedly by two men on a motorbike, has ‘shocked us all’

A prominent Greek crime journalist has been shot dead in what was described as an “execution-style” murder near his home in Athens.

Giorgos Karaivaz, who sought to illuminate Greece’s seamier underside with his coverage of law and order stories on the private Star TV channel, died of gunshot wounds outside his home in the south of the city.

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Curfews and quarantines: Europe faces another Easter of Covid restrictions

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From France to Spain, Germany to Greece, tight rules are in place to contain the spread of coronavirus

Europe may not be subject to the drastic lockdown measures introduced to combat the first wave of coronavirus a year ago, but many countries still face another Easter of greatly reduced meeting and movement.

In France, new restrictions come into effect across the country from 7pm on Saturday that limit travel to within 10km (six miles) of home, absent one of the allowed “imperative” reasons. Sworn declarations known as “attestations” will be necessary for anyone travelling outside these rules.

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Tourists in Greece and Spain but most of Covid-hit Europe plans Easter at home

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Several thousand Germans head to Crete and Balearic islands as pandemic third wave spreads across EU

The first foreign tourists may have landed in locked-down Spain and Greece, but as a third wave of the pandemic accelerates across the EU, few Europeans will be enjoying an Easter break abroad – or even away from home.

German holidaymakers began arriving on Crete on Monday, with six half-empty flights landing at Heraklion airport after the tourist minister, Haris Theoharis, said some visitors could be permitted before the country’s planned reopening on 14 May.

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EU announces funding for five new refugee camps on Greek islands

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Ylva Johansson’s visit Lesbos and Samos met with demonstrations from locals, as charities warn camps are ‘recipe for catastrophe’

The EU is to give Greece funding to build five new refuge camps on the Aegean islands.

Ylva Johansson, the EU home affairs commissioner, visited Lesbos and Samos on Monday to announce that the EU would provide €250m of funding (£213m) for five new structures on the islands of Lesbos, Samos, Chios, Kos and Leros.

A large crowd of demonstrators gathered outside the town hall on the waterfront in Mytilene, the capital of Lesbos, to protest against her visit. Some wrapped themselves in Greek flags and others held signs calling for European solidarity. One sign read: “No to European Guantánamos. Shame on you, Europe.” Another said: “No structures on the island, Europe take responsibility.”

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Doubts cast over provenance of unearthed Sappho poems

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Original account of discovery is retracted by editors of the scholarly book in which it was published

When two hitherto unknown poems by Sappho were brought to light in early 2014, it was a literary sensation. The sixth-century BC poet is one of the most celebrated writers of Greco-Roman antiquity, a tender chronicler of the agonies of female desire, and a gay icon. But frustratingly few works by her survive, and those that do largely come from ancient papyrus fragments preserved in the dry sands of Egypt.

But now the editors of a scholarly volume in which the circumstances of the discovery were detailed have formally retracted the chapter because the manuscript’s “provenance is tainted,” according to a statement issued through the book’s academic publisher, Brill.

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EU’s southern states step up calls for ‘solidarity’ in managing mass migration

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Greece, Italy, Spain, Cyprus and Malta say burden has to be shared more justly with other EU partners

Europe’s southern states have stepped up calls for solidarity in managing mass migration to the bloc saying the burden has to be shared more justly with other EU partners.

Highlighting the deep divisions over the issue, politicians from countries along Europe’s Mediterranean rim said a proposed migration pact fell far short of resolving the crisis equitably.

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‘We were left in the sea’: asylum seekers forced off Lesbos

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One refugee’s terrifying story illustrates how ‘pushbacks’ are creating a crisis for the right to asylum at Europe’s borders

“We were all forced on to the boat. If we looked up they shouted at us and hit us in the head. Then they stopped at a place in the sea where there were no other boats, they left us.”

Mustafa, his wife and two young children had only been on the Greek island of Lesbos a few hours when, they say, they were driven in a van to the coast, beaten by masked men and then taken out to sea on a raft and abandoned there.

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Covid: EU unveils ‘digital green certificate’ to allow citizens to travel

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Plan will also allow states most reliant on tourism to make bilateral arrangements with non-EU members – including UK

The European commission has unveiled a “digital green certificate” that could allow EU citizens who have been vaccinated, tested negative or recovered from Covid-19 to travel more freely within the bloc this summer.

The plan would also allow southern states such as Spain, Greece and Portugal, whose economies are most reliant on tourism, to make bilateral arrangements with non-EU members – including Britain – providing the deals are approved by the commission.

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Boris Johnson rules out return of Parthenon marbles to Greece

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Prime minister says sculptures taken by Lord Elgin would remain in Britain as they had been legally acquired

Boris Johnson has used his first interview with a European newspaper since becoming the UK’s prime minister to issue a point-blank rejection of the Parthenon marbles being returned to Greece.

Johnson insisted that the sculptures, removed from the monument by Lord Elgin in circumstances that have since spurred one of the world’s most famous cultural rows, would remain in Britain because they had been legally acquired.

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