Greece's Asylum Service

Greece's Asylum Service will start receiving new asylum applications as of May 18, the Migration Ministry announced on Friday, after having stopped for two and a half months.

To maintain social distancing, half of the staff will work from home.

Greece's Asylum Service is struggling with a backlog of more than 62,000 cases while an estimated 5,500 new applications are submitted every year by people entering the country, Kathimerini understands.

Greece's Asylum Service, which operates under the Migration Ministry, was assigned a new chief on Thursday.

Markos Karavias, an assistant professor of international law specializing in immigration at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, is formally taking over the post during a particularly pressing period.

The union of contract workers at Greece's Asylum Service are staging a two-day strike on Wednesday and Thursday to demand permanent jobs and payment of their wages for September.

In a statement on Tuesday, the union said there is concern that 100 contract workers stand to lose their jobs and warned that it will escalate strike action.

Greece's Asylum Service on Friday published data showing that more than 18,000 asylum seekers were relocated from Greece to other countries in the European Union from October 2015 until August 27 of this year and that flights are already scheduled for another 984 people.

Thousands of asylum applications remain pending even though the influx of undocumented migrants into Greece from neighboring Turkey has plummeted over the past year.

A total of 2,627 migrants landed on the islands of the eastern Aegean from Turkey between January 1 and March 5 this year, according to government data. In the same period last year, that number was 121,426.