Greek lawmakers voted on Friday to temporarily stop processing asylum requests from illegal migrants arriving from North Africa by sea in a bid to reduce arrivals into Europe's southernmost tip, a move activist groups and opposition parties have called illegal.
The ban comes amid a surge in illegal migrants reaching the island of Crete and after talks with Libya's Benghazi-based government to stem the flow were cancelled acrimoniously this week.
It marks a further hardening of Greece's stance towards illegal migrants under Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis' government, which has built a fence at its northern land borders and boosted sea patrols since it came to power in 2019.
Open borders activist groups accuse Greece of forcefully turning back "asylum-seekers" on its sea and land borders.
The government denies wrongdoing.
The law, which received 177 votes in favour and 74 against, halts asylum processing for at least three months and allows authorities to quickly repatriate illegal migrants without any prior identification process.
"Faced with the sharp increase in irregular arrivals by sea from North Africa, particularly from Libya to Crete, we have taken the difficult but absolutely necessary decision to temporarily suspend the examination of asylum applications," Mitsotakis was quoted by his office as telling the German newspaper Bild on Friday.
"Greece is not a gateway to Europe open to everyone."
Greece was on the front line of an illegal migration crisis in 2015-16 when hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa passed through its islands and mainland.
Since then, flows have dropped off dramatically. While there has been a rise in arrivals to the outlying islands of Crete and Gavdos, those numbers have quadrupled to over 7,000 so far this year, sea arrivals to Greece as a whole dropped by 5.5 per cent to 17,000 in the first half of this year, UN data show.
Thousands of illegal migrants have been rescued by the Greek coastguard off Crete in recent days, the Athens government said. Hundreds of them, including children, were temporarily housed at an exhibition centre in Agyia, near the city of Chania in western Crete, amid sweltering summer temperatures.
Crete lacks an organised reception facility. The government said it would build a illegal migrant camp there but the local tourist industry is worried the plan could harm the island's image.
“The weight is too great, the load is too big, and solutions now have to be found...at a central level,” said George Tsapakos, a deputy governor for Crete.
(Reporting by Renee Maltezou and Angeliki Koutantou; editing by Edward McAllister and Mark Heinrich)