Refugee

A total of 150 people in an accommodation facility in the town of Kranidi, in southern Greece, have tested positive for the new coronavirus, Deputy Civil Protection Minister Nikos Hardalias told jousnalists after visiting the site on Tuesday.

Hardalias said 148 of these are refugees, one is an employee, and one is an aid worker. All patients are asymptomatic, he said.

Forty-seven unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors were relocated from Greece to Germany Saturday.

Germany's interior minister, Horst Seehofer, said the evacuation was "the result of months of preparation and intense talks with our European partners" and expressed hope that other countries would also begin taking in refugee children soon.

A dozen unaccompanied refugee and migrant minors were flown from Greece to Luxembourg on Wednesday as part of a European Union initiative to expedite the relocation of some 1,600 over the next few months to EU member-states.

Twenty unaccompanied refugee minors were scheduled to leave the overcrowded camp of Moria on Lesvos island on Tuesday for mainland Greece, from where they will depart for Germany and relocation there on April 18.
In addition, another 20 asylum applicants are also leaving for Piraeus through a program of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, to be housed in facilities on the mainland.

The Austrian government has agreed to send Greece 181 containers to be used for the accommodation of migrants and refugees and as mobile healthcare facilities, following a request by Athens, according to the ministry of migration on Thursday.

Greece has had to place two camps on lockdown after 21 migrants tested positive for Covid-19.

Luxembourg has agreed to relocate twelve unaccompanied refugee children from Greece by next week, Alternate Migration and Asylum Minister Giorgos Koumoutsakos said on Tuesday, after a phone call with the country's Foreign Minister, Jean Asselborn.

A plan is under way to relocate at least 1,600 unaccompanied minors from Greek refugee camps to several European Unon countries, European Commission spokesman Jahnz Adalbert has said.

The relocation was decided on March 6 but has been delayed by the spread of the coronavirus. 

A facility belonging to a locally based non-governmental organization called Stand By Me Lesvos was destroyed in a fire in the early hours of Tuesday, local media on the eastern Aegean island have reported.

The United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees signed in Geneva in 1951, and amended by the Protocol signed in New York in 1967, defines a refugee as "someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion."

Four asylum seekers, injured by Greek security forces along the Turkey-Greece border, applied to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), state-run Anadolu Agency reported on March 16.   

Ali Cengiz Kalkan, the provincial health director of Northwestern Edirne province, told Anadolu Agency that the asylum seekers applied to the ECHR through their lawyers.