Deportation

About 20,000 migrants have passed through the Sofia Busmantsi Detention Centre. The situation is beyond extreme. Given a capacity of 940 migrants, there are now 1,631 persons or an occupancy rate of 174% . There are 395 persons registered outside the Detention Centre living at their own expense.

Some 200 migrants were deported by boat on Monday from the Greek islands of Lesbos and Chios to the Turkish coastal town of Dikili, escorted by officers from the EU border protection agency Frontex.

Greek media reported that riot police units were also deployed on the boats.

Germany will make it easier to deport criminal foreigners following public outrage over the New Year's Eve assaults in Cologne, officials said on Jan. 12.

"With this proposal we are significantly lowering the hurdles for the possible expulsion of foreigners who have committed crimes in Germany," Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told reporters in Berlin.

Asylum seekers returned to Hungary "run a considerable risk of being subject to human rights violations” - and deportation to Serbia.

This is due to the changes introduced in Hungary in the asylum law and practice in recent months, Council of Europe (CoE) Commissioner for Human Rights Nils Muiznieks said on Wednesday.

In a ruling likely to set a precedent for similar cases, Turkey's top court has halted the deportation of an Iranian family, arguing their deportation could jeopardize the "material and moral integrity" of the family and they could face "ill-treatment."

French MPs on June 24 approved a landmark deal with the United States in which France agreed to pay $60 million in overall compensation to foreign nationals deported to Nazi death camps on French trains in World War II.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davuto?lu has said he has already highlighted that deportation is a crime against humanity, less than a day earlier his former interior minister, Efkan Ala, said that what the Ottoman Empire did to the Armenians a century ago was not "genocide" but deportation. 
 

The number of undocumented migrants who participated in a repatriation scheme run by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in cooperation with Greek authorities, rose by 6 percent in 2014 compared to the previous year, the Greek Police said on Thursday, releasing its annual figures.

The Aliens Directorate deported 629 undocumented migrants in September with the cooperation of the local branch of the International Organization for Migration, the Greek police announced on Monday.

The majority of the migrants were flown back to Albania (83 individuals), Pakistan (43) and Algeria (25).

Some 100 undocumented immigrants on Tuesday launched a hunger strike at a reception center in Paranesti, in the northern regional unit of Drama, demanding to be released after having been issued with documents suspending their deportation.

According to the Athens-Macedonian News Agency, the detainees were recently transferred to the center from the eastern Aegean island of Samos.