First GAPs Stakeholder Expert Panel and EKKE team meeting in Greece on October 4, 2023
The overall contribution of the meeting to the GAPs research in Greece was crucial, and more common activities are planned to take place in the months to come.
On October 4, 2023, the first Stakeholder Expert Panel (SEP) meeting took place in Greece, in the context of the GAPs: “De-centring the Study of Migrant Returns and Readmission Policies in Europe and Beyond” project. Stakeholder Expert Panels, established in each partner country of GAPs, include country experts, key stakeholders in policy making and implementation, including representatives from international organizations, NGOs, and other civil society actors. SEPs aim to provide expertise, counseling, and feedback to the research teams, particularly concerning the research outputs, reports, and policy-relevant results. These involve the periodic participation in exchange meetings, internal or public workshops, and roundtables, among other activities. In this way, communication channels are created to foster crucial interconnections between research and policy in each partner country.
In the case of Greece, the aim of the first meeting between the Stakeholder Expert Panel and National Center for Social Research’s (EKKE) (partner in the GAPs project) research team was both to constitute a first acquaintance and presentation of the GAPs project to the SEP members and to carry out a roundtable discussion on the work currently implemented by EKKE on the legal framework on returns in Greece. The SEP participants included representatives from the Recording Mechanism of Informal Forced Returns of the Greek National Commission for Human Rights, the External Audit of Forced Returns of The Greek Ombudsman, the Hellenic League for Human Rights, the IOM office in Greece, the Greek Council for Refugees, the NGO Refugee Support Aegean, the Greek Forum of Refugees, and the newspaper Efimerida ton Sintakton.
A significant part of the discussion was devoted to the issue of the ambiguity and misleading use of concepts around returns, particularly around the terms of “returns” and “deportations” which –as mentioned in the discussion– bring to the forefront ethical, political, and institutional factual concerns. This is related to the legal framework which permits the implementation of parallel procedures of both returns and deportations, even after the transmission of the EU Directive on returns in the Greek legislation, a fact that results in several legal, institutional, and operational gaps. The existence of these parallel –and different– procedures is also reflected in the existing official statistical data that refer to the forced returns, the voluntary ones, and the voluntary assisted returns implemented by IOM. A number of concerns were also raised around the voluntary character of the particular types of returns, especially if the context in which they are taking place is considered; a context of strict regularization procedures, precarious conditions of reception and protection, and absent prospects of integration. Furthermore, another major point of concern was the relation between returns and detention, as two parallel and interconnected procedures that feed off each other. As mentioned in the discussion, long-term detention has been the rule in the case of Greece, even if it is supposed to be the exception according to the legal framework.
The overall contribution of the meeting to the GAPs research in Greece was crucial, and more common activities are planned to take place in the months to come.