8000 refugees left Greece for Germany
A media report stated that thousands of refugees who previously received protection in Greece later arrived by air in Germany and submitted new asylum applications, despite European laws prohibiting this procedure.
According to information from the German Ministry of the Interior, around 8,000 refugees from Greece submitted protection applications to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bamf) between January and May of this year. The total number of these cases in 2024 exceeded 26,000. This phenomenon is known as "secondary migration," which allows those granted protection to move within the Schengen Area for up to 90 days within a 6-month period, but without submitting a new asylum application in another EU country.
The German Ministry of the Interior emphasized that anyone who receives protection in a European country must use that right only there. However, many have managed to travel by air from Greece to Germany without being intercepted. The German Police Union (GdP) warned of significant gaps in airport security. Andreas Roßkopf, head of the federal police department in the union, confirmed that the police are working intensively at the land borders with Poland and Austria, while airports are suffering from a clear lack of oversight, describing the situation as "absurd."
The union demanded that the police be granted additional powers to deal with this secondary migration, including the ability to deny entry to those who are not entitled to apply for new asylum. It called for closer coordination with EU countries and airlines. In April, the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig ruled that the deportation of healthy, single migrants capable of working to Greece is legal, despite deficiencies in the Greek reception system, considering that this group does not face a "serious existential threat."
However, Athens has expressed its refusal to accept refugees who left its territory after submitting asylum applications there and then submitted a new application in Germany, complicating their repatriation process. For its part, the organization "Pro Asyl" expressed its rejection of these policies, describing the situation in Greece as "inhumane" and stating that there has been no significant improvement for years. Meral Zeyler from the Europe section of the organization said: "The harsh reality still exists: no bed, no bread, no soap."