There are many groups and individuals that are not represented or cannot profit from the already existing legal aid structures in Thessaloniki.

After the closure of the Balkan route, people that want to organize their support for people on the move independently or have a more political focus of their work, are suppressed from doing so on a daily base. Aid that is allowed is mainly focused on the humanitarian aspect of the so-called “European refugee crisis” and often puts people in a state, where they are becoming victimized objects.

By forcing people forced to migrate into sometimes closed camps that are controlled by the state, military or selectively chosen NGOs, the authorities can control what form this aid is supposed to have and to which groups and individuals migrants and refugees are allowed to get in contact. So it happened that many people with the intention to help are put in a position where instead of understanding and fighting the source of the crisis are becoming a tool to control and manage migration movements.

Those who refuse to become part of this system are more and more becoming the target of state and police repression. This form of repression is often not directly targeting the political action itself but uses already existing laws and “random” police controls in order to keep people from doing the work they are doing. For example independent structures and individuals are often charged for having kitchen knives in their vehicles, have to go through identity controls, get their bags and cars searched or are just held at police stations for random reasons, even if the authorities can’t prove anything. The aim of this form of repression is to scare people from doing their work on the one hand and on the other hand to keep independent and political structures busy with court cases, organizing lawyer costs or just randomly wasting time in police stations and controls. Always having to rethink tactics and being targeted as an individual or group can lead to great exhaustion and distress. There is a need for a structure that is trying to support independent structures by supporting people that have become target of repression on the one hand and by providing them with the knowledge and information they need to prevent this.

Another group of people that are often forgotten in the existing support structures are people without papers. The currently used praxis of having to apply for an appointment at the asylum service via Skype (which is only possible for one hour every week for each language) has created a situation where many people do not have the possibility to obtain a legal status in Greece. As racial profiling is still a common practice in Europe, these people are often object to “random” police controls. Especially people from Morocco, Algeria and Pakistan are not able to provide identification documents, which makes them “criminal” in the eyes of the law and therefore they are often imprisoned or transferred to closed camps. Furthermore they are often not able to move freely because they are afraid to get controlled by the police and are not allowed in the official camps and have therefore no access to the (albeit inefficient) aid provided there. Thus there are currently thousands of people that are forced to live in secret shelters outside the city and that are not able to get access to the official support structures or have people they can contact when they get arrested, imprisoned or mistreated.

The police is using this lack of structures. Many times people are forced to sign papers at police stations without the presence of lawyers or translators or even being informed about their basic rights. There are many reports about beatings, threats and other forms of abuse in police stations and it is difficult to get information about whats going on in the prisons and police stations. We are trying to build up a structure that can be a contact for these people that are systematically deprived their basic rights, trying to monitor and publish mistreatments and at the same time empowering people to claim their rights by passing on information about those.

Detention centers and closed camps to which mainly people are transferred who come from countries, that have low rates of recognition of their asylum claims, are another form of repression the state uses against unwanted immigrants. Detention centers itself are prisons with the difference that the only crime people who are imprisoned have committed is being born with the wrong nationality. According to current law, people can be held prisoner in detention centers for up to 18 months without ever facing a trial and few possibilities to appeal against their imprisonment. Detention centers are a tool of the state to break the will of people on the move and to force them to leave the country “voluntarily”. It is often not clear for the imprisoned why they are held in detention or how long their detention will last. The conditions in those camps are often even worse than the conditions in the open camps and people living there often have only few possibilities to get in contact with the outside world or legal aid. In conversations with people who have been detained for months we hear many reports about physical and psychological abuse, threats and racist treatment by the police. Therefore the existence and use of detention is a form of repression used mainly against people that are labeled as “economic migrants” and has the aim of putting these people in a mental and physical state, where returning to the countries they were fleeing from, appears to them as the better option than being a prisoner for an unclear period of time.

The current system of migration is not just criminalizing and illegalizing people by not giving them the possibility to obtain some sort of “legal” status. As “legal” ways of traveling are a privilege that only some have access to, the majority of the people is forced into dangerous and expensive “illegal” ways of migration. The journey from Turkey to Greece currently costs around 1500 Euros per person. Therefore people that arrive in Greece and are stuck here are often out of any money or have huge debts in their home countries. They are not able to get access to any financial or humanitarian support in Greece and often see themselves forced to find illegal ways of having an income. In Thessaloniki many people that find themselves in this situation end up selling drugs at Rotonda. The illegalization of drugs does not end (as governments are often trying to tell us) its consumption. If anything it is creating a reality in which those who are already not given any options see this as their only option left. Furthermore this situation makes people without any “legal” status even more vulnerable for becoming target of the police than they have already been before. Government and media are then using this situation again in order to reinforce the picture of the “criminal migrants” that can not be accepted in one’s territory.

The criminalization of drugs and those who are forced to sell them can be seen as a clear political tool in order to enforce the current system of migration. If for example people then get arrested after police raids at Rotonda, there is currently only few structures that try to support them and many people have few knowledge about their rights and options, not mentioning making their situation public. Drug selling is often perceived as being an “ugly reality” that nobody really wants to deal with.

We are currently witnessing a time where an ever growing group of people is made invisible and deprived of their basic rights, because they are prevented from getting a status that allows them to participate in this society. We need to make this group of people that officially doesn’t exist visible again. One way of doing this can be providing basic information, legal support, monitoring and publishing the current situation.