Introduction

The hotspot approach

So much ink has been spilled about the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015 that it is almost impossible to refer to it without the fear of falling into endless repetition. Reports from international organisations state that in the period between January 2015 and September 2015, the largest number of refugees since World War II moved into Europe. During those months, an estimated 1,000,000 refugees arrived in Europe, about 850,000 of whom via Greece as gateway and mainly via the islands of Lesvos and Samos. Among them, there were thousands of unaccompanied minors; minors travelling without their parent/legal guardian. In May of the same year, the European Commission introduced ‘The hotspot approach to managing exceptional migratory flows’ as defined in the European Agenda on Migration and formally endorsed by the European Council on 25– 26 June 2015. In early 2016, Greece legally introduced the establishment of these centres with Law L4375/2016. Under this law, five so-called hotspots, officially titled ‘Registration and Identification Centres’ (RICs), were created on the islands of Lesvos, Samos, Kos, Leros and Chios. A few days before the Greek law, the ratification of the EU-Turkey Statement came into effect stating that:

With this agreement, ‘the corresponding regimes, which have long been criticized by Europeans for their infringements of human rights and the rule of law, would now be seen as guaranteeing sufficient protection for refugees’ (Fassin, 2016: 1).

The impact of the ‘hotspots’ in Greece on the migration management was immediate and severe (Afouxenidis et al, 2017; Kourachanis, 2018). Suddenly, Greece changed from being one of the main gateways – together with Italy and Spain – towards Northern Europe, to being the main migrant detention centre in the EU. Thousands of people kept arriving to the Greek islands, only to find out that they were no longer allowed to leave, but had to proceed with their asylum application at the RICs. If they refused to apply for asylum at the ‘hotspot’, they were immediately subject of deportation to Turkey.